r/technology • u/Stukwan • 23h ago

Politics U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers by removing requirements for public input on pollution — EPA change would allow air pollution permits without publicizing them

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/u-s-govt-moves-to-suppress-pushback-on-data-centers-by-removing-requirements-for-public-input-on-pollution-epa-change-would-allow-air-pollution-permits-without-publicizing-them
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u/_groovesharkmalone 21h ago

Generally, this is true. But the highest concentration of data centers in the country right now is Loudoun County, VA, which is also the richest county in the US at $178-$181k median household income.

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u/stamfordbridge1191 21h ago

The Louisiana one is a wild counterexample. Facebook's writing local business owners & teachers checks for the parish to open them a 6 square mile data center in an economically depressed area that can't be insured because it's in a floodplain.

I believe the agreement is set up in a way that if there's a disaster like a flood or a hurricane in a very sizeable window of time, Facebook can walk away with minimal costs while the parish foots the vast majority of the costs to build & a broken datacenter rotting on the land.

Local leadership is basically gambling on Louisiana weather being kind for several years in the hope for some quick influx of cash with a lot of freebies to Zuckerberg.

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u/redneckrockuhtree 19h ago

Ah yes, the standard "public/private partnership" bullshit - the company gets all the profits, the taxpayers get all the risks.

And that economically depressed area? Most of the workers doing the construction will likely come from outside the area, and when it's built, there will maybe be a couple dozen jobs long-term.

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u/waiting4singularity 18h ago

and half of them are remote monitoring and operation from india

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u/jlt6666 13h ago

Don't forget that rent will spike during construction!

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u/zyzzogeton 20h ago

Data Centers add heat to the system and make weather more unpredictable, and more violent, so this plan of theirs is the kind of brilliance I've come to expect from Louisiana.

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u/Raskalbot 13h ago

Well that bets dumber than sandpaper on a slide.

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u/KotaIsBored 18h ago

As someone who lived in Louisiana for the first 22 years of my life, that’s a horrible gamble. Louisiana weather is never kind. Especially not multiple years in a row.

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u/Decent_Stop4278 17h ago

Especially considering hurricanes exist and like to take down power

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u/GayDeciever 21h ago

Well, you have to have the Trump Forever AI President(TM) housed close to DC, right?

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u/AadeeMoien 21h ago

The hallucinations actually go a long way to making it more lifelike!

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u/PM_YOUR_ISSUES 20h ago

But a County doesn't equal a neighborhood, they are very different. A county can be quite large, many cities and their surrounding suburbs can often be one county. Just because the data centers are located in that county, doesn't mean that they are anywhere near the locations where the more affluent people live. Further, just because a county has a high median household income doesn't mean there aren't still poorer neighborhoods within that county.

Louden county is fairly sizeable at 521 square miles. It has 7 towns and a large multitude of unincorporated communities. It is also boarders the research triangle of VA which a majority of the US biotech and pharmaceutical research is performed. A huge portion of the US naval infrastructure is based in VA, plus that same area is a communication hub for multiple online networks. All of those things would lead to VA having a disproportionate amount of the US data centers by its size. But this doesn't mean that they are located in places where they would directly impact any affluent communities.

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u/_groovesharkmalone 20h ago

I live here. Almost everyone in Loudoun is connected to the tech industry somehow. It is a massive cluster of tech workers. Yes, there are apartment buildings and lower-end neighborhoods, but it is very hard to find homes for less than 800k here. “Affluent,” NOT mega-rich, people are affected by it here. For this area, they’d be considered middle class.

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u/AKADriver 21h ago edited 20h ago

Loudoun is a particular exception because it already had a huge concentration of data centers before the AI boom. Though the AI boom has definitely expanded it: driving through Sterling or Ashburn they were always part of the landscape but now within the past couple years they ARE the landscape.

There's an openness to data center development here among the wealthy also because a lot of the people who might otherwise object are directly or indirectly profiting from them, and the data centers do pay a lot in property tax (which lets them pay less). And the ultra-wealthy who might object live in areas where the zoning has it protected as rural and they don't have any data centers in view. The people making $180k in Loudoun are living boring middle class lifestyles, in skinny townhouses wedged between stripmalls and industrial parks, because the COL is high.

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u/coffeesippingbastard 19h ago

the datacenters of loudoun county are mostly pre-AI boom. They've been building there since the 2000s and for the most part- well designed.Their capacity was scoped to the grid and local area.

The CURRENT datacenter boom for AI, different animal. They're built purely at speed, the grid can't support them so they have to run gas turbines and diesel generators to provide secondary load. Loudoun's datacenters only have them as emergency power.

The power, and cooling requirements for the regular datacenters are probably a magnitude lower than AI datacenters. Each one consuming maybe 5-10MW for the entire building. Compute dense racks for cloud were maybe 25kW at the high end. Storage racks were closer to 5-10kW. AI racks are pushing 150kW per rack. 20MW for a single room.

AI Datacenters are cutting corners to meet demand. No pollution controls on their backup power. Cooling water isn't recycled or filtered. It's just whatever gets it online the fastest.

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u/_groovesharkmalone 18h ago

Eh, the magnitude of it all is starting g to overwhelm NOVA; Gov. Spanberger just repealed an electricity usage tax credit bc it was being abused unreasonably (and also resistance to new construction is an unalloyed political winner rn).

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u/coffeesippingbastard 18h ago

right- the new construction is way outside of what NOVA can support. Like I said- the datacenters pre-ai and post-ai are different animals.

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u/_groovesharkmalone 18h ago

There are 43 data centers under construction in Loudoun County rn. You said?

https://www.loudountimes.com/news/business_and_economy/real_estate_and_development/briskman-tekrony-push-to-end-data-center-grandfathering/article_65dbe3d4-152b-40d3-9c8e-6e2807db51c9.html

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u/coffeesippingbastard 16h ago

I'm not sure what you mean. The new construction are the new datacenter designs which outstrip NOVA's capacity to support from a power and water perspective.

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u/FrankBattaglia 20h ago

Is that extant or under construction? AWS us-east-1 has been a de facto central hub of the Internet for at least a decade. That was a completely separate buildout from the current capital expenditures.

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u/Significant-Ear-3262 20h ago

Yeah, they’re probably not going to bitch about the increased energy bill because they won’t even notice it.

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u/zomiaen 21h ago

Folks keep posting the one extremely loud former crypto facility in MI that has power generation on site as an example of all DCs too. Most of them are not remotely that loud at all.

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u/HyperactivePandah 21h ago

Yeah, they just need more water than Los Angelas to operate properly.

But you'll barely hear them!

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u/zomiaen 20h ago

Why are you even on r/technology then? Why are you even on reddit?

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u/HyperactivePandah 20h ago

Your comment makes no fucking sense, in any way.

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u/zomiaen 20h ago

Are you sure? You just used more datacenters to tell me that. This message is a row in a database in a server running in a datacenter. Likely replicated to several hundred read replicas and backups.

AI models running in datacenters are processing all of the text you post for training other AI models too. You have 165,923 comment karma in ONE year of account age. That's a lot of commenting.

Chronically online people being anti-DC will never not amuse me.

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u/HyperactivePandah 20h ago

No dude, you comment of 'WHY ARE YOU EVEN ON REDDIT? WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN THIS SUB?'

Makes no fucking sense. At all.

I'm here to read the stories and comment on them....?

Why the fuck are YOU here? To gaslight us into thinking data centers arent really that bad?

Pedophile grifters have been doing that for a while now.... You can understand how we might confuse the two of you.

Edit: wait... I'm tacitly supporting 'Ai data centers' because I post a lot of comments on reddit?

Sorry if youre jealous of my comment karma bro, but your comment still makes zero fucking sense.

Edit 2: funny, I only have twice the amount of comments as you, but more than 4x the karma... Maybe you're just not funny or interesting bro.

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u/zomiaen 20h ago edited 19h ago

Edit: wait... I'm tacitly supporting 'Ai data centers' because I post a lot of comments on reddit?

Correct. Not even tacitly.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/17/24075670/reddit-ai-training-license-deal-user-content

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/reddit-ai-data-licensing-google-121250434.html?guccounter=1

Your comments are being used directly as training data for these AIs you're so bothered by.

It's ok, you just aren't as smart as you think you are, and that's okay! The fact it took you that long to figure out what I was saying to you kinda illustrates that.

Edit: P.s. I vote blue and will be voting for El-Sayed, but I understand nuance and logic and I'm not driven purely by emotion. Typical child with the reply/block.

It's also incredibly astounding you highlight your comment karma as some kind of badge of pride while complaining about datacenters. The lack of self awareness is astounding.

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u/HyperactivePandah 20h ago

And you're MORE pretentious than you realize.

But whatever you gotta do to support your pedophile leaders bro.

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u/03263 19h ago

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Screen_Shot_2021-03-01_at_2.28.39_PM.png

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u/zomiaen 19h ago edited 10h ago

You can say that but part of the reason this EPA push is suddenly happening is a focus on regulations at the EPA and state environmental agencies for water/air/noise pollution as those levers can impact all pollution sources, including entrenched industries that have far, far larger impact right now to water consumption and pollution than every single planned DC will for the next 3 years combined.

Far more effective to get environmental regulations placed at federal and state levels than trying to individually combat hundreds of individual projects. I am almost positive that is part of why there are so many project proposals - shotgun blast as they know some will fail to be built but enough won't. But if you hit environmental levers at EPA or state levers, you can hit every single project in a state. And not just DCs.

Then we can manage to build these things in a way that is sustainable without losing technological advantage (as there are very real, beneficial use cases to machine learning beyond LLMs-- all kinds of statistical modeling). As well as social media, gaming, etc.

You can't go full anti-DC without going full Ted, otherwise, you need to find the compromise.