One of America's Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center
gadgetreview.com
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And IMO the data centers could be built that are much less intrusive in the neighborhood. Perhaps they could blunt some of the complaints by covering the buildings and parking areas with solar panels. I suspect the answer here is that the companies building data centers are putting every possible dollar into data and compute capacity and as little as possible into mitigating the factors that lead to complaints.
Industrial sites: On the shores of Lake Michigan in Illinois there used to be a steel mill - US Steel's South Works. It's abandoned and is designated a "quantum park" (Illinois Quantum and Microelectronic Park.) Neighbors have extracted an agreement from the governor to not build a data center there. It seems to me that a data center would be much less objectionable than a steel mill. (I worked at a steel mill in the 70s and they are nasty places.)
Just north of Rockford IL there is a plan to build a data center which is drawing objections due to the impact on "quality of life." I can't speak to that but it looks like it would be situated in what is now farm land. Several farms would probably be bought up to make this, if it happens.
I think there are two motivations to build data centers in space, despite the technical challenges:
* Outside of any regulatory boundary, though I'm not sure how much that matters if they're selling their services within a regulated area. * No neighbors to complain.
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But of course some industrial areas, while polluted, are sometimes kind of close to poor residential neighborhoods. And im not sure a data center would do them any favors.
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Now some weeks ago, it was discovered in another new DC project that they (or their partner) cut down a large forest without proper process. This could sour the public opinion and also cause delays. It's still unclear why this happened.
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maybe I'm just a weirdo crunchy granola YIMBY type, but am I the only one who would be really proud to live next to one of those things (not to mention, appreciative of those big swoopy cooling towers for purely aesthetic reasons)?
Like, seriously, "oh hey, this building is the reason why we have ridiculously inexpensive clean energy and it's really cool to be able to look under the hood a bit and appreciate how humanity bucked up and solved the energy crisis once and for all" would actually be enough of a reason for me to accept and assimilate the risky prospect of living right next to a nuclear plant.
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I feel this way about nuclear power plants.
I do not feel this way about the recent suggestions to build hyperscale datacenters. (Not datacenters in general, because obviously we need them to have an internet. Duh. I am specifically talking about the new ventures to flatten especially-huge tracts of land for the express purpose of training or running "AI" (LLM) models).
The reason why I feel this way about nuclear plants but not about (new, hyperscale, earmarked-for-"AI") datacenters is because I am skeptical about the social good associated with the latter.
I know that so-called "AI" is more or less the (fruitful) result of taking BERT and "throwing hardware at it" until you've munched through the entirety of the plaintext internet as a dataset. I appreciate that that gain occurred, and I am glad to see that machine learning has made incremental progress in the narrowly-limited application of "understanding" natural language (without getting too picky about the syntax errors).
But this round of the AI summer/AI winter hype cycle is reminding me of the time when we figured out deep neural networks for OCR and suddenly it's "The computers can understand our handwriting!!! Hallelujah, the Singularity is nigh!"
I am not convinced that we need to be constructing a Ft. Meade in every neighborhood and swapping out chesnut groves for concrete just because some dope hasn't figured out that they should be metering down to the FlOps/Watt and actively reflecting that in their pricing model.
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Soon there will be a story like this about one of americas last journalists being buried in the cement foundation of a data center.
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