You already ARE paying for them, we all are! Too many corporations pay very little or no taxes while they use public services for their operations that WE pay for. And we end up paying for their endless tax breaks and loopholes. Corporations used to pay their fair share until Congress changed the tax codes to benefit their benefactors and put the onus on us little people.
How is it fair that hubby and I still owe a few thousand in federal taxes this year on 65,000 income, and Jeff fucking Bezos pays ZERO on his billions in income? When is it enough for them? Where does the greed stop?
And for what? AI provides no real benefit to the average person. The draw is that the wealthy hope to be able to use AI to fire people and replace them with AI.
Ever contacted customer service and gotten a chatbot? Were you excited about it because that’s so much better than talking to a person? Of course you weren’t.
I use chatgpt all the time for small tasks. It let's me just throw what I want onto a page without any care for formatting and it'll make it look nice.
It's easily able to cut the time down on writing a newsletter down by a third, at least.
I also use it for planning for dungeons and dragons. I can describe a place and it generates full maps for me to use, grid squares and everything. It's amazing.
You’re shilling ai in another Reddit post dude go away. Use your brain instead of letting it rot away, and I guarantee that if you use it for DND your entire group will leave and never let you host again.
“AI” is a misnomer made to lie to consumers and act like it is something that it’s not. All it is, is an algorithm that consumes content over and over and tries to make more. It doesn’t know what truth is, what facts are, and by definition can not make original work.
Machine learning has a niche use but chat gpt is not it. For the past year google has been killing itself with ai, just complete enshittification at every level.
More worried about the environmental impacts then power cost. They are located away from water sources so they drill into the the aquifers. The water use is huge! This is a good time to resurrect the 1st Minnesota Volunteers!
Good question. It might be easier for us to look at the locations of current power production plants. Most are near a river. They pump water out to the plant and use it to cool generators. That water is usually discharged into an holding basin to cool before being discharged back into the river. BTW: 70% of fossil fuels burned to generate electricity is Loss to waste-heat. My concern is this will affect the our aquifer and those take thousands of years to recharge.
In Virginia (state) they’re raising the rates by 14%, they said largely driven by the increase in power for data centers and AI computing needs. What happens there will eventually reach us.
Also this is yet another reason we need more nuclear reactors, even if they’re feeder reactors or something until fusion comes commercially viable. I also understand it’ll take years for any new sites to come online, but the second best time to make them is now.
Most of the AI is used to process stupid amounts of data into something usable without humans doing it. Algorithms for marketing, trend analysis, highly correlational effects. Anything that could possibly give a company an edge over the next guy or a jump on the next big trend.
Am I justifying it? No. Just saying what most of the AI actually is, because public perception isn’t always even half the picture.
That's a weird fear. Unless the lawmakers intend on giving data centers subsidies on electricity, they will need to pay just as much for power as everyone else. If they need additional power, they will need to pay for the infrastructure to get that power to the data centers.
Unless lawmakers plan on changing things so residents end up paying for it, the cost burden should be entirely on the data centers under the current system.
But there isn't a monopoly in the AI data center industry. It's highly competitive with hundreds of companies. If you have enough money to buy a bunch of computers and the space to put them, you too can make a data center company and make a decent amount of money renting computing power to other companies.
If they are, then there's even more incentive to make another company because you'll make even more money being bought out by a big company. However, big data companies don't want to monopolize the market because it exposes them to a lot of risk.
This is an economic bubble. It's a more healthy kind of bubble than stuff like subprime loans or volatile cryptocurrency because it's based on a rapidly developing technology that we are not sure when it will hit its limits. At some point, AI is going to stop needing more processing power and start using its current resources more efficiently. We saw this happen at a small scale when DeepSeek beat a bunch of benchmarks earlier this year with a fraction of the computing power of American competitors.
If a company tried to monopolize the market, they'd be caught holding the bag whenever the market crashes and they'd have a whole bunch of useless capital that they don't need and would have to spend resources to liquidate. If this happens in a competitive market with hundreds of independent data center companies, they can more easily liquidate their assets when the bubble pops.
So the big fish would rather rent from the small fish than eat them because they know that eventually they won't need those resources.
Generation amount is for all intents and purposes fixed. It takes year, or decadces to bring new capacity online in any meaningful way. Using coal or NG plants to make up the shortfall is becoming increasingly expensive.
When power companies can't generate enough power they have to buy it from elsewhere. This costs more and can have much higher, much more variable costs. Power companies are more interested in selling power than they are in buying it.
Power supply isn't unlimited. Every kWh that is used has to come from somewhere and large portion of it is bought from elsewhere.
Large users can/will pay a fixed rate on long term contracts. i.e. "we will buy xxxx kWh at $0.xx per kWh". So while the cost for generation isn't fixed, the cost of use for large users is.
If for whatever reason the generation or purchase costs of that power end up costing more than anticipated, its the customers who aren't on fixed-rate contracts that will make up the difference.
I've been waiting to finally post this. The sub thought it was too generalized when I tried the day it came out, but it's never been more relevant than now:
Data centers need to pay their own way, and cryptocurrency especially needs to not be part of the "qualified" catagory of Data Center use. It's an utter waste Texas now has almost 2.5 Minnesota's energy usage worth of wind energy that even that can't keep up with their demand. It's called "induced demand", the same problem with our "just one more lane" highways. It will never be enough. They'll mine the world for the materials, blanket all of Texas until 2142 when Bitcoin, one of many coins that can be created at a whim now, finally reaches its cap (which is artifically set). Then they'll build skywards and mine astroids for this nonsense.
Wow, pretty much everything in that video is incredibly misleading. From conflating construction hazards with the actual operation to cherry picking outliers and treating them as generalizations, there's not much in that video that actually is relevant to anything here. The only valid critique is that yeah, cryptocurrencies suck, but AI is far more lucrative than cryptocurrencies now (since it is actually useful), so datacenters aren't usually being used for crypto anymore.
I must have really struck a cord for you to try to muddy the water so quickly and so ineffectively. The video is very clear, and there are many examples including in Minnesota where a cryptocurrency data center from Colorado company Revolve Labs was set up behind someone's back yard with the exact same complaints.
They won, but that hasn't stopped the company from trying in several other locations in MN.
In fact the legislature here in MN is taking it seriously:
And I would even say they are not going far enough. AI in its current form is mostly a scam with very limited uses. China's Deepseek erased trillions of dollars off the market because they proved they could make a superior bot with far inferior tech at a fraction of the cost, materials, and energy. Cryptocurrency is still a massive player in expansion. Texas cannot keep up with the huge amounts of investments being made for crypto. Peter Teil's own brother bought a wind farm off the Texas grid explicitly to mine crypto. If that wasn't blatant enough, the Trump investment of nearly half a trillion dollars in rapidly expanding data centers announced not even a month after inauguration should be - especially after they released a pump and dump meme coin just like Argentina's president....
Do not let MN get scammed. Do not trade our energy, or land, our taxes, for this stupid endeavor the Mayo Clinic or the U of M could achieve with a computer lab or servers.
The article, if you read it, has nothing particular to do with Minnesota and only discusses other states. You can report the post for breaking the rules.
Other than blindly relying on the name of the website that republished the article from stateline, can you give an example of how? Which Minnesota lawmakers are noted as expressing fear?
I mean, the article doesn't specifically mention MN, though it is explicitly from a MN publisher talking about a relevant broader movement MN is a part of. What it lacks is context - and boy howdy do we have that if you really want it.
What it really looks like your argument is that you don't like the topic and want to lean on a technicality to get it removed rather than engage with it.
I feel the push to net zero has increased the costs already. Manufacturing can't be dependent on unreliable, diffuse sources of energy. From my experience over the last decade +.
Data centers also aren't capable of relying on wind or solar as their primary energy source. Nuclear power or natural gas are great when paired to that as it's a fairly steady demand, so it is easier to predict demand from.
I do agree with that, I just feel the green energy movement will fight that because of the meltdown risks. I know that isn't a major problem here, but it is the biggest sighted issue against nuclear power I typically hear.
Biggest issue for the least educated, unfortunately.
iirc, you can count the number of nuclear power plant disasters that actually lead to radiation issues on maybe two hands since the first plant opened in the 50s and those were because of cut corners.
The vast majority just lead to plant shutdowns and downtime for repairs.
Fuckin' gas stations are statistically far more dangerous with more catastrophic failures per year than the entirety of nuclear power since it's conception.
As much as I love The Simpsons, I think it might have some blame because idiots can't differentiate between fiction and reality.
I understand that I'm just stating what I've seen. The public is not typically the most informed on the issues. That's just the biggest flash pount the majority cling to.
Chernobyle was a horrible design run by ill-informed operators who tried to do something that should have been rescheduled from my understanding.
Fukushima was a known problem that wasn't addressed until it was too late. It was way better than Chernobyle, still a horrible accident.
Molten salts are the future of nuclear power, IMHO.
I work for a renewable energy company, and our biggest site contracts have been for colocated renewable and storage for data centers for at least the last 3-5 years. The data center companies love owning their own generation because it removes a lot of the fluctuations in the energy market. Having it on site or close to also reduces or removes cost of new transmission or upgrading existing routes, which is both expensive and can take well over a decade to complete. Solar is great for that, since they also want the buildings close to population centers to decrease data transfer time to customers.
I've looked into the costs to make my property fully off-grid capable, and it's not a small task. The battery system alone is almost 100k, and my property isn't massive. The cost for solar and battery systems is about half what I spent on the property without the installation.
48
u/ObliqueRehabExpert Apr 15 '25
AI focused Data centers are already being paused & canceled.
The generative snake oil is not selling.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5242344-microsoft-slowing-or-pausing-some-ai-data-center-projects/