One way to know the data center backlash is working is that the New York Times opinion section is freaking out.
Over the weekend, the Times published a guest essay titled “The Environmental Case Against Data Centers Is Misguided,” by Experimental Psychologist/Substacker Adam Mastroianni. The argument he makes is a good indicator of the current industry talking points. To wit:
-People sure do seem to hate data centers! But should they, though? When you think about it, data centers really aren’t so bad.
-Here are some statistics about energy usage and environmental impacts. They were generated by a handful of industry-funded bloggers and think tanks. Surely their modeling assumptions are pure and good. And, look at that! They use practically no energy at all. It turns out that data centers are way less harmful than golf courses. You don’t see people protesting golf courses, do ya?
-Anyway this is just a new form of NIMBYism. All those data centers are bound to get built somewhere. So, when you think about it, powerful communities stopping data centers in one place just means they’ll get built in poorer communities. Surely there are better ways to fight the AI industry.
-And hey, I’m critical of the AI industry too! There are good and bad things about the AI revolution. But what we should really be focused on is responsible use. Everyone, individually, ought to think about the right and wrong ways to incorporate AI into our lives. That would be far more effective than the data center backlash. Let’s engage in this totally different conversation about ethics and personal responsibility.
I’m seeing this same argument pop up a lot, particularly in techno-optimist/reactionary-centrist circles. And there are just three quick things I want to say about it:
The math on energy and water usage is complicated. (Read Matteo Wong, “The Truth about AI’s Water Use” and Alex Reisner, “Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster.”) It’s complicated because an awful lot depends on design choices and cost calculation. You could build a data center that uses basically no water, and that is powered entirely by solar and batteries. But that would cost a lot more money and take a lot more time. The hyperscalers are treating AI as a race, and are burning cash at a phenomenal rate. So of course the actual environmental costs are much higher than the ones calculated by the industry’s bloggers-of-choice.
Here’s something that isn’t complicated: the sheer, unprecedented scale of their proposed buildout. The hyperscalers are aiming to build 10 gigawatt data centers. 10 gigawatts of power is around the same energy consumption as New York City during a heat wave. That’s… a lot.
2a. Anytime you have an emerging industry, no established industry standards, and big questions about its impacts, some of the biggest fights will be second-order arguments over what we should measure and how we should measure it. Industry-friendly blogger Andy Masley has made a name for himself by “debunking” environmentalist claims. He mostly does so by changing the scope of analysis to things like the cost of a single ChatGPT prompt. It’s a fundamentally silly argument to get involved in. The AI executives are saying (basically) “we plan to consume so much power that we will soon need to blot out the sun with space data centers,” and their favored bloggers are then chiming in to say “but when you think about it, that’s not much energy usage at all!” Massive new data centers are, in fact massive. This isn’t complicated. The people saying otherwise are either grifters or marks.
And, also, this is entirely about political power. Of course it is. They wouldn’t be complaining in the NYT if it wasn’t working. Last week I was listening to David Roberts’s Volts podcast last week, and he noted that the AI industry has made a colossal blunder by not just, like, paying for goodwill from all these towns. It would be relatively cheap, compared to what they’re spending, to just build schools and libraries and clean energy grids for these towns. But of course OpenAI and Elon’s company and all their competitors aren’t actually doing that. It would cost them money and time, plus they would have to explain to their next round of investors why a chunk of their money went to building a library in Ohio instead of making the Singularity happen any minute now. They could make these communities better, just like they could use the data center buildout as a tool for rebuilding the energy grid and radically increasing renewable energy capacity. But they won’t, because that isn’t the game they are playing. It never has been, and it never will be, unless we completely shift the power dynamics.
I wrote a couple months ago about data center activism as a bankshot. The reason why I think this activism is very good, and very promising, is that it has the potential to interfere with the AI financial bubble. If that bubble pops, it unsettles the power dynamics shaping the AI future. If you think it is bad that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a handful of their billionaire buddies are effectively unconstrained, then the most effective thing you can do is pick a fight over data center siting in your area.
People really hate the AI future right now. And people have no place to put that hatred. They see it coming. They see Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Dario Amodei being smug assholes, promising that no one will have a job and only a few dozen people will have any money and teehee maybe it will end the world but probably not and anyway you better let them do whatever they want because otherwise China will do it first and where is your patriotism anyway?
And they see that this handful of shitty dudes has all the money and all the power and AI is getting stuffed into every product and some of it is kind of cool, though a lot of it is annoying, but it isn’t as though anyone can do anything about it.
(…)
Data Centers aren’t the perfect vehicle for all those sentiments. But they are a perfectly functional vehicle. David Sacks (or whoever replaces him as AI Czar) isn’t going to listen to you, because David Sacks (and that whole odious crowd) doesn’t care about democracy to begin with. And your member of Congress probably isn’t going to listen to you, because they’re worried about facing an avalanche of AI political spending in 2026. Also, even if they did, lol Congress doesn’t pass laws anymore, and any worthwhile law they did somehow pass would be vetoed by Trump or overturned by the Court.
But your state and local reps really might listen to you. AI isn’t primarily a zoning issue, but treating it as a zoning issue is one of the few ways to voice productive, collective dissent.
Mastroianni concludes by arguing for a politics of personal responsibility. He writes:
“I am a scientist and a writer, and I’m happy to use A.I. to do my job better: I’ll let it write code, fetch articles for me to read or flag errors in statistical analyses for me to investigate further. A.I. is a tool. Its purpose is to serve our purposes. If it does that well, it might be worth the water and electricity it consumes.
I refuse to let A.I. evolve from a tool into a partner. I won’t let it write my sentences. I don’t share with it my fears, hopes or dreams the way I would with a friend or lover. I don’t trust its factual claims unless I can check the sources myself. (…)
It should be humiliating to choose A.I. friendships over human ones. It should be cringe to willingly consume computer-generated slop. Trying to pass off a large language model’s words as your own should be seen not just as cheating but also as loser behavior.
It might sound idealistic to suggest that every person has some influence over the future of technology. Yet this has proved true over and over again, even in the recent past. Plenty of expensive tech ventures have failed. They weren’t banned, voted out or blocked by zoning laws. They failed because people refused to reward them with time and attention: The Metaverse. Quibi. Nonfungible tokens. A.I. is unlikely to disappear, but the form it takes is up to us.
I’m going to presume this argument is made in good faith. I don’t know Mastroianni. Maybe he really is deeply critical of the current trajectory of A.I., and also deeply concerned that the A.I. critics are going about things the wrong way.
But let me just say that his theory-of-change absolutely sucks. The A.I. industry is powerful and fragile. A.I. opponents have landed on a strategy that successfully generates collective action and challenges the industry where it is most vulnerable. And this guy thinks what everyone ought to do instead is focus on their own personal decisions and vague social norms.
The tactic is working. Bad, powerful people are freaked out. Don’t listen to their favorite bloggers who say “well, when you think about it from just the right angle, data centers aren’t any worse than golf courses.”
When you have a tactic that is working, and your opponent doesn’t have a good countertactic, the smart move is to keep doing it.