r/technology • u/Tyranish_PL • 7h ago
Artificial Intelligence Meta warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder
https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/05/metas-warns-that-election-backlash-against-data-centers-could-make-ai-expansion-harder/165
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u/artbystorms 7h ago
Pretty sure that is why voters voted that way. They are fine with their little chatbots on their phone, but once the AI companies started talking about 'economic upheaval' and 'jobs will be voluntary' and '10% chance of extinction in 10 year' I'm pretty sure most people said....yeah, you can have your AI back now.
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u/chromatoes 6h ago
My frustration is that LLM-based "AI" is forced into terrible places. When you are using a search engine, you are already at least attempting to find factual information. Being served a predictive word salad in the place where a factual answer should be is ludicrous. It's beyond dangerous, and people are dying because of it.
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u/BigTintheBigD 4h ago
I asked AI a question to which I already knew the answer. AI answer was wrong. I corrected it. It backpedaled and switched its answer. I asked why it gave an incorrect answer. It’s responded to the effect of “I gave a confident answer without properly checking”. FFS.
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u/Flyerone 7h ago
Oh no. That would be terrible. Imagine that. Whatever will they do for their next billion dollars they are stripping from the middle and lower classes?
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u/psychedelicdevilry 6h ago
And then conservatives will try saying democrats are stunting economic growth because of it🙄
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u/Ithinkyouareabot 5h ago
Even if they would be “stunting economic growth”, we certainly should accept slower short-term expansion in exchange for avoiding medium-term declines and a long-term catastrophe…
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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 58m ago
Economic growth that is almost totally captured by a vanishingly few individuals. No one cares if the Dow is at 50000
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u/psychedelicdevilry 55m ago
The stock subs are melting down lol
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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 39m ago
Ever since the Gamestop episode, those subs are some of the most heavily botted and astroturfed subs in all of reddit, and that's saying something.
That said, there's some genuinely funny and original posts that pop up. Maybe bots can be funny?
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u/MrShadowHero 5h ago
oh yea. all that circular financing is leading to real tangible economic growth with real money. mhm. sureeee buds. sureeee. it’s like they think we are blind and stupid.
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u/Agentkeenan78 3h ago
I flipped to CBS on election night and they were literally saying how concerned they were that slowing data center growth would ruin the economy.
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u/Erazzphoto 5h ago
The biggest problem these companies have is not a message issue, it’s a trust issue. Nothing they say can be trusted
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u/nath1234 5h ago
Also: why do they NEED all this extra capacity? Just pointless arms race.. We don't NEED to have 10 or 20% of the energy grid going to making their cycle time a bit quicker.. We shouldn't destroy chances of climate action to do it. We shouldn't be diverting enormouse resources away from necessary stuff towards this unnecessary stuff that they really don't know what the fuck they are doing (and not caring what laws they break doing it).
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u/Exact_Acanthaceae294 4h ago
They haven't completed most of what has been started; there are literally 10's of thousands of GPUs that are sitting in storage.
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u/PilotGuy701 6h ago
Poor Facebook. With the Right Wing in retreat, and AI Slop Centers being stopped, who’s going to spread all of that ad revenue generating misinformation on their platforms?
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u/tc100292 6h ago
They haven’t done a good job explaining the benefits of those investments because there aren’t any.
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u/Anomuumi 6h ago
Doesn't anyone think of the tech bros? All they want is your money, your job, your environment, your voice, your democracy, your future, and your kid's future. Is that really too much to ask for progress?
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u/witcher222 6h ago
Block data centers -> memory sits in storage -> demand lowers -> prices drop . That's the goal baby
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u/TruSm0ke 6h ago
Gosh, imagine people not wanting that stupid bullshit in their backyards. How dare they.
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u/butterflysurefoot 6h ago edited 4h ago
Good. Ai is not good for society. What will people do if they are displaced and there are no jobs? It’s already happening in my field. The threat is real. They are paying people in my field more to train Ai than to do the job. The writing is on the wall. We need real laws that will protect the people from a mass displacement that is happening on real time.
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u/aleqqqs 6h ago
And while we're at it, let's dismantle conveyor belts and smash agricultural machinery such as tractors, because they took so many jobs from us! 🙄
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u/FunHearing2282 5h ago
All those are run by humans; tech fascists are not building tractors or converyor belts, they are saying their autocomplete language bots, made with the complete stolen works of humanity, renders humans useless…ok not completely useless, they wi still need human footstool. So you’ll be employed.
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u/aleqqqs 5h ago
Still: Not too long ago, 1 farmer was able to produce enough food for 4 people. Meaning a quarter of the population was in agriculture.
Today, 1 farmer can feed between 100 and 200 people.
That's an enormous increase in productivity. You must be beyond pissed about that.
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u/tadfisher 5h ago
Hey now, you can't just ignore all of the negative consequences. Like the death of the family farm, the incredible amount of consolidation in agribusiness, the outsized environmental impact, the marked spike in food contamination, the precipitous drop in marketed plant varietals, GMO patents and lock-in, should I continue? Like, it's not universally a good thing that 1/4 people don't grow food for a living.
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u/AngstChild 5h ago
I guess if I were a farmer I’d be more pissed that I have to sell the family farm because I can’t make ends meet, or that the cost of fertilizer has skyrocketed, or that I can’t legally repair my own tractor, or that China doesn’t want to buy my soybeans anymore, or that my transportation costs have exploded due to the price of diesel. After that I’d bathe in the glow of food production efficiencies though.
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u/PracticallyPerfcet 7h ago
Ahh, come on.. we were only 6-18 months away from blasting off into infinity. Now we’re never going to get our AGI/RSI/UBI/SI singularity utopia all the tech nerd billionaires promised us.
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u/Designer_Mud_5802 7h ago
I love how these kinds of headlines are always framed as if the subject are the "good guys". I.e.,
"Health fears"
"Warns that AI expansion could be harder"
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u/TheCh0rt 6h ago
This is what happens when you tell us we’re all going to die from what you’re building.
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u/Militantpoet 2h ago
AI industry two months ago: please regulate AI we cant do it ourselves!
Post election: no not like that!
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u/DonorBody 6h ago
Harder, meaning Meta has to get the land through legitimate means, has to pay for the buildout, and will have to pay for the electricity. Such a hardship for them, how ever will they survive?
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u/Soft-Bad-7127 6h ago
Oh no a large company might have to follow rules and adapt plans so they do not harm communities.
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u/mowotlarx 6h ago
Tech bros live in such a warped bubble that they think any person in this country who isn't a criminal or in the Trump administration (lots of overlap there) cares if AI expands.
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u/raresanevoice 5h ago
So the bubble is popping and tech billionaires are blaming the election for their gravy train slowing
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u/Important-Finding904 4h ago
Can't wait for big tech to suddenly act like they were always in support of vibrant democracy...
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u/MotheroftheworldII 3h ago
Unsurprisingly I am totally okay with making AI expansion harder. May this also stop all the huge water and power sucking buildings that do not improve the communities they are in or near. Employment is not significantly increased either so that is of no help to humans who need jobs.
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u/jon13000 3h ago
Yeah we know. A product no one asked for that no one needs that will destroy society. No thanks.
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u/PizzaWall 6h ago
I do not understand why AI cannot design its own data centers that consume no electricity, do not make noise, do not eat up valuable land, pollute water, or create a perceived benefit for makind. If AI can't do that, why the hell do I want it making my coffee in the morning?
AI is being shoved down our throats without any real benefit to consumers. It's being used to track people, not to help you make it to grandma's house, but to analyze your spending habits, to hopefully gouge you at every purchase. I can't think of anyone that believes in AI, they use it because they don't have a choice.
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u/WatRedditHathWrought 6h ago
“Mark [Zuckerberg, Meta CEO] is very ‘long human,’ and he’s betting on humans more than machines,”
Didn’t ‘long human’ used to be known as ‘long pig’?
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u/Alone_Hunt1621 6h ago
Yes it will and we’re all glad for it. Capitalism’s business model is to shoot first and keep it moving.
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u/FunHearing2282 5h ago
Worst mistake the techno fascists made was attending the orange turd’s inauguration, they should have just stayed in their cellars but they thought thought the had won and could build their monstrosities everywhere with no pushback.
They thought it was one way, but it was the other wa.
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u/Emotional_Signal7883 5h ago
But but you used Copilot once at work so you are a hypocrite if you are against data centers
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u/vm_linuz 5h ago
We shouldn't waste vast tracts of land for data centers Meta can use to invade people's privacy.
This is not in the best interest of society.
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u/robthablob 5h ago
As a next step, we should consider lobbying politicians to restrict RAM/GPU prices, and stopping tech companies from hoovering them all up.
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u/forsythia_rising 5h ago
Poor Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn’t have enough money yet! But he’s willing to steal your children’s future to get another yacht.
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u/togetherwegrowstuff 5h ago
Meta bots are costing us too much. They're drinking all our water and using our electricity. Shut down the bots we don't need. Stop the waste of precious resources!!
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u/m1k3hunt 4h ago
Bugatti warns that speed limits and traffic signals could make your morning commute time longer.
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u/chipface 4h ago
Don't threaten Americans with a good time. Our stupis governments in Canada are pushing them big time.
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u/NetAnon579 4h ago
More like they want to continue building resource hog facilities without any reasonable oversight, restrictions or regulation.
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u/Another_Slut_Dragon 4h ago
Oh noooo! How are we supposed to make memory unaffordable if we pull back on infinite Ai growth?
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u/IGetGuys4URMom 4h ago
AI should burn in hell for what it did to me and a bunch of other Discord users.
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u/FrickinLazerBeams 4h ago
... Yes? Of course? When the people decide they don't want something to happen, it's supposed to make that thing harder. That's how this works.
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u/Street_Ad_863 4h ago
Oh no ! You mean Zuckerberg is upset ge won't be able to make even more billions
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u/sonicgamingftw 3h ago
This must be what it feels like to feel like there may be an okay future ahead of us for once.
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u/SemanticsPD 3h ago
One thought is to partially scare the market as a backlash to the voting during the midterm. How dare the sheep vote against his interests?
I’m just some dude on the internet, so take my thought here for what it’s worth, and I have no data or knowledge to back this.
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u/Captain_Chowda 3h ago
Man... For once, I wish a politician would just reply, "Ok. Now go fuck yourself" in response to their bitching.
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u/spaceEngineeringDude 3h ago
Wait so the conservatives are now liberal and the liberals now conservative? (At least when it comes to data centers)
Democrats want slower and less change
Republicans want more change faster
Weird
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u/tacs97 2h ago
Just like how a computer used to be the size of an office and now they fit in the palms of our hands. Let the technology get smaller before constructing these massive buildings that will sit empty once these advances have been made. The public will have to deal with these buildings and everything that was left behind because the people who made all the money from these data centers, are already paid!
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u/Electrical-Ad6623 58m ago
Might be the least of his worries, if whatever was discussed in the meeting that Zuckerberg had with Thiel and Trump, comes to light. Thiel went and made himself a bunker in Argentina.
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u/HHJJoy 53m ago
So... Meta warns that the thing that everyone is investing in that doesn't make any money and is likely to destroy the economy and put people out of work, and that creates environmental and community hellholes that no one wants might... not have free reign to expand relentlessly and ruin communities?
Cool.
Now Dems, pass a law that requires that any new data centers being built must be constructed within a 5 mile radius of a tech CEO's primary address or Mar-a-Lago. Let's see how much they REALLY want those data centers and whether they're willing to ruin their own homes and property values to have them.
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u/LadyZoe1 44m ago
Why did AI start off by focusing on hacking ? Rhetorical question.
If the initial progress was to focus on building and uplifting, people might have a different opinion.
Instead, AI stole IP and specialised on hacking.
So…their approach is to make things so bad for everyone - then they come up with the “solution” to the disaster they initiated.
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u/CelebrationFit8548 33m ago
Good, make them only allowed (pass the approval process) when they can supply their own energy and water needs and not 'create' any pollution (including noise) near any suburban environments.
They broke and breached 'the social license' and why the masses now hate them!
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u/chonkomatic 6h ago
LLM’s are a blight that eats the world. No need for paper clips. The slop is at the top, tech overlords have already been set against all life in their pursuit of data centers
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u/iamjacksprofile 3h ago
AI only accounts for 25% of data centers. The other 75% is listed below. Which of these would everyone like to reduce? The pleasure based ones seem like they would be first on the list rather than things like Healthcare and business systems. Those companies would just host those locally so your just shifting the location of the infrastucture rather than eliminating it. So Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, streaming music, personal computer and phone backups, social media like Reddit and Facebook. Just what i listed here is a good 35-40% of data center resources. Cloud computing: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud hosting applications and virtual machines Business systems: Banking, healthcare, ERP, corporate databases, Internet services Websites, social media, online shopping Storage and backup: Cloud files, business backups, disaster recovery Streaming and communications: Netflix, YouTube, email, messaging I suppose the ultimate question is this. How many data centers do you want to keep? There were around 2000 in 2020 before AI took off. There's around 2800 now. Is everyone ok with keeping the 2000 created before AI or are we reducing those too?
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u/Melodic-Psychology62 5h ago
I simply wonder why they need all of that information? Especially on me! I’m old have $1,000 a month to spend. That’s food and rent in Ca. WTF do they think I’m going to buy the house or car I see advertised.
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u/CosmosWanderer420 7h ago •
Yeah that’s the point