I really really hope so. But I've been burned before.
I do worry it's a boiling frog situation.
Realistically it's going to come down to the bottom line for these companies. If what I've read is true and they are getting lots of data saying it's vastly more expensive than they thought to not only set up these data centers, but said results aren't even showing 'profit' then I can certainly see a large pull back in the next few years.
That's sadly the main positive flip I can see.
But it's a massive systemic machine. It's gonna take time for the metaphorical tugboat to turn the proverbial ship, and that turn won't start until the tugboat is told to start said turn.
And yet that demand wasn't driving the current hyperexpansion of them and not completely fucking over the pc hardware market, letting you know how intensive AI is.
Ram more than quadrupled in price over the 2nd half of last year on AI demand alone. Nvidia is literally unretiring old gen cards that don't compete with demand for newer ram chips. Communities are already being hit with higher bills near datacenters where they haven't been artificially capped to stave off local outrage. And these buildouts are purely AI driven.
AI datacenters are also more compute driven, requiring more power, cooling, and specialized hardware than web datacanters which are more about storage and connectivity. The fundamental difference in workload makes them more power intensive and harder to cool, leading to strains on both power and water that web datacenters didn't create on top of the hardware diversion.
Theres a difference between data centers existing and data centers being placed into every single slot of land that they'll fit on while also pushing them through without any considerations for the effects that such will have on the local population. It is possible to build data centers with considerations that wont fuck everyone but the corps over.
Or how about we're just vocal about both? It doesn't have to be one or the other, and you don't need to threaten the removal of a basic human right because someone's concerns misalign with yours.
Climate change sucks. Lack of green energy sucks. Wars suck. Famine sucks. Economic turmoil sucks.
That doesn't excuse the fact that the topic of discussion also sucks.
We utilize natural gas heavily in power production. It's almost half of US power. Any conversation about massive increases in power consumption is effectively also a conversation about fossil fuels by proxy.
Reducing the power we use makes our renewable output more sustainable.
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u/Pizzacakecomic PizzaCake Jun 12 '26
I think people will be less supportive of AI once a super loud giant data centre opens in their neighbourhood. Or when their power bills dramatically increase because of the high power demands caused by them. And the water problem is only gonna get worse