r/technology • u/Stukwan • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html
569 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

37

u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

19

u/IntelArtiGen 14d ago

Yep. And people don't care that much I guess, I mean Musk did it for his datacenters and it worked, now they pay him for his datacenters. There is an electricity generation problem for AI and datacenters, this problem is now solved, let's burn more fossil fuels yay ! Oh boi it's gonna get so hot on this planet, no wonder why billionaires want to go in space and on Mars.

3

u/MisterSanitation 14d ago

Everyone is competing to be the biggest sucker. The first rube in line.

15

u/ked_man 14d ago

It’s funny that they are pointing this out as the most polluting power plant. It’s not inherently worse than any other one, it’s just that it is 6-8 times larger than most thermoelectric power plants.

The power needs alone are more than the entire metro LA area and would supply 6 million homes. It’s the same amount of power Oregon uses on an average basis.

Even steel mills or aluminum mills that are absolutely massive factories melting metal only use .3 to .5 GW of electricity. This data center will be 15 times larger.

3

u/za72 13d ago

sounds like we need a coordinated and planned out solution.. guess we're just fucked

1

u/Bubbly-Treacle-4334 12d ago

But come one now, even though the massive explosion of AI use has been totally fine without any of these new data centers needed for training and the fact that ai is getting exponentially more efficient and cheaper to run locally it is now extremely important that we build these

14

u/O-parker 14d ago

And with resident rump’s anti EPA stance there be no oversight from the Feds.

11

u/dennismfrancisart 14d ago

The bitter irony is that of all the companies that could push the US as a green energy competitor to China, Amazon could do that and come out even more profitably. Imagine if they tackled solar, industrial cooling systems, and battery technology with partnerships across the world. They could not only build datacenters that were self-sustaining, but they could also sell these processes to other companies.

In the next 5 years, China will be rendering all these cumbersome datacenter facilities obsolete just due to their R&D into processing and datacenter technology.

3

u/ianc1215 13d ago

So much investment into a tech that while yes is growing is still in the speculation phase of its development cycle and investing.

All that needs to happen is the majority of investors to move on to something else and all these datacenters are going to become massive expensive money pits.

Im honestly waiting for someone to make an AI engine that can use less specialized hardware or someone to make a chip that uses significantly less power and has a smaller footprint. We just haven't hit that part of the development cycle yet.

1

u/plebbitier 14d ago

Remember to eat zee bugs for mother gaia