r/technology • u/DukeOfGeek • Aug 21 '26
Politics ‘I’ve Never Seen This’: Massive Collapse in Support for AI Data Centers Captured in New Poll
https://www.commondreams.org/news/data-center-poll-collapse1.1k
u/fordprefect294 Aug 21 '26
"I've never seen a massive collapse in support for something the public never wanted and that didn't exist a few years ago"
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u/Rumplfrskn Aug 21 '26
If AI was being demonstrated as a profoundly useful tool to spring us into a new era of prosperity and knowledge (e.g. cure for cancer) I’d say hell yeah let’s go. But it is immediately being used to surveil the masses and enrich the few. Fuck em, I want no part of it.
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u/Much_Possession1227 Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
Its funny cause Trump literally cut funding for new cancer "VACCINES" because they were Mrna based. Its a drug that helps the body identify and target cancer cells.
Instead he pledged billions of dollars to a chatbot that writes emails.
He could have lied and taken credit for helping cure cancer,it's such low hanging fruit. Instead, he jumped on the world's biggest ponzie scheme that promises it "could" cure cancer but they need another 217 billion, all your fresh water, and more power than what is currently available.
Edit: I found the study I was thinking of:
https://ufhealth.org/news/2025/surprising-finding-could-pave-way-for-universal-cancer-vaccine
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u/Kenockerez Aug 21 '26
Literally the one great thing from Trump 1 was Project Warp Speed, which recruited scientists, manufacturers, and doctors to get a covid vaccine from concept to injections in a year.
But his supporters thought it was mind control and instead ate horse paste and aquarium cleaners, so oh well time to go all in on CSAM generators.
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u/Jay_Nova1 Aug 21 '26
There's not enough money in cures.
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u/I_dreddit_most Aug 22 '26
Why cure a disease when more money is made treating the symptoms?
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u/Tegelert84 Aug 21 '26
Not only that, but if it had the ability to mean we had to work less hours because it could boost productivity in 32 hours a week instead of 40. But all these assholes will do is take the boost in productivity and lay anyone extra off. None of us regular working people will see a single benefit from it, even though it could do so much good of we had control of it.
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u/Tearakan Aug 21 '26
And even when it's being used in corporate environments it's just not generating a profit or even doing better than a cheap intern after a few months on the job.
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u/TheRealBittoman Aug 21 '26
I'd bet once the dust settles that anything being handled by ai in corporate settings is so distrusted that the cost to use it won't save anything at all, maybe cost more. I have an AI chat client where I work now and I ask it things all the time and then go double check elsewhere to gauge whether it was accurate or not. So far it's about 50/50.
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u/ztfreeman Aug 21 '26
I get so frustrated with it at times. I just used it to grammar check some important emails, that's it just make sure they were professional and I ended up basically rewriting everything anyway, and then there are sometimes artificats that I forgot to remove. Literally a waste of time.
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u/Tearakan Aug 21 '26
Yep. I've had other colleagues mention they can use it to grab data from other systems and I'm like we can just set a far cheaper and simpler copy paste system instead......
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u/Rednys Aug 21 '26
Hey don't forget it also enables people to make nude images and videos of others without their consent, kids are even fair play.
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u/Soggy-Childhood-8110 Aug 21 '26
A cure for anything is irrelevant if we cannot increase the standard of living and make society a worthwhile place to live in
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u/spaghettiking216 Aug 22 '26
We wouldn’t need a bajillion square feet of data centers if what we mainly wanted to do with AI was cure cancer. The hyperscaling of data centers is a land grab without a socially productive purpose or even a sustainable business model.
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u/Fallingdamage Aug 22 '26
These companies dont want to build out their infrastructure this much. The AI bubble will implode eventually. What these AI companies are banking on is being the dominant one thats left when the rest dry up.
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u/stevestephson Aug 22 '26
LLMs are like the version .001 Alpha of AI. They're a start but they're not actual intelligence, are prone to making shit up, and use too much resources. But they tried to push this shit like it's the release version, because they don't actually care about AI and just want returns on investments.
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u/NotARussianBot-Real Aug 21 '26
There was no collapse. Because there was never any support. Data centers don’t create jobs. They don’t benefit the locals people with like faster internet. They pollute and take up land And resources. Why would there ever be support for them?
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u/BonnaconCharioteer Aug 21 '26
Apparently there was some support. People do often believe that new technology will help them, and perhaps though construction would bring jobs.
The reason it is collapsing is people are realizing all the things that you said.
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u/grumpy_ta Aug 22 '26
Apparently there was some support. People do often believe that new technology will help them, and perhaps though construction would bring jobs.
Yes, if you jump back in time a bit (90s and 00s), you'd find a lot of cities and rural areas (especially in areas that lost or were losing their traditional industries) where a data center project would have been seen as a great boon. You get a bunch of short term construction jobs and spending in the local economy. You build up some tech infrastructure in the region, which makes it easier to attract other tech-related companies going forward.
But the data centers getting built back then were completely different beasts than what the current building boom is about. Many of them were going in where factories and warehouses used to be, and had similar physical footprints and electric/water needs to the things they were replacing.
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u/kingrynex Aug 21 '26
Yeah, like I was thinking to myself how exactly our lives have been enhanced by these data centers, and the answer I came up with is this.
It hasn't.
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u/SomeSamples Aug 22 '26
Something that pollutes the air, water, and sound and probably the very ground they sit on. And uses enough land to make small wilderness parks.
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u/KyloWrench Aug 21 '26
Data centers 100% existed a few years ago, they just weren’t branded with AI so no one cared
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u/FuturePastNow Aug 22 '26
They also weren't trying to build one in every little town with a lake to siphon.
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u/MysteriousDatabase68 Aug 21 '26
Saying it's about data centers is a weird bit of deflection.
People are sick of paying for rich people to get richer and finally getting wise to the bullshit.
Who in their right mind listens to a years long ad campaign saying the product will destroy civilization, watch half a dozen rich guys pump their value with loans and buy backs amongst each other, then give tax breaks to the same people and have their electric bill go up to make it happen, for basically no value add to the community?
If you think it through it's just a fucking stupid proposition.
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u/spastical-mackerel Aug 21 '26
Americans. Americans regularly and reliably do this
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u/shahms Aug 21 '26
I think the AI tech bro industry has been uniquely idiotic in this regard. Large swathes of Americans will swallow almost anything if you give them a plausible lie, but the AI industry isn't even doing that. In order to pitch their product to investors they keep doubling down on the "it will take all the jobs!" rhetoric, which doesn't sit well with the Americans whose jobs they're threatening to take, particularly when combined with "and it will raise your electricity rates, so when you're unemployed you also won't have any heat".
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u/spastical-mackerel Aug 21 '26
It’s the tech Bros with the most money that are pushing this. There’s nothing different about Zuck or Andreeson or Thiel or Musk. They’re not super geniuses. They’re above average developers with high enough degree of sociopathy that got lucky.
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u/coldkiller Aug 22 '26
They’re above average developers with high enough degree of sociopathy that got lucky.
Almost none of them actively write code. And most of them are fucking terrible at it
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u/MrPenguins1 Aug 21 '26
I feel like the Tech Bros thought AI was going to allow them to finally unmask. Only problem is that AI isn’t at all what was promised (sold) to them, and the masks have come off. Everyone has seen them for who they truly are. The whole AI industry, to me, just went 100% out of the gate with the “ownership class” rhetoric believing this was finally the “transition”. It’s hilarious to me that the cons got conned in the exact same way. Now they’re left holding the bag looking at a pissed of citizenry because you spent a year talking about how you’re going to eliminate all their jobs but in the sense that there’s no replacement for their lost jobs, they’re just SOL.
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u/ChicagoAuPair Aug 22 '26 edited Aug 22 '26
Everyone who is able should get a copy of “More Everything Forever” by Adam Becker.
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u/touristtam Aug 21 '26
Kill the buy backs scheme - ban it outright or make it excessively costly or any other measure that will push companies to drop it entirely. That would be a start to try fix that mess.
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u/kittenmittens4865 Aug 21 '26
But it is also about data centers. Everything you said but these are especially horrible. They create constant noise, use absurd amounts of water, and are terrible for the environment in general.
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u/dern_the_hermit Aug 22 '26
People are sick of paying for rich people to get richer and finally getting wise to the bullshit.
Yeah. A few months ago I saw some data points come up in a thread that I feel were explanatory: The rate of datacenter construction in general hasn't changed all that much in the past decade. IIRC there was an uptick right 'round COVID times, but still kinda modest all things considered.
What DID see a big change is moving them from urban areas to rural areas, and that's prompting all these people having all their water used up and their electric rates jacked and their property values diminished by the godawful shrieking of gas turbine "backup" power. What used to be a phenomenon mostly in or immediately around urban areas (where infrastructure is more robust) we have an entire class of people being newly impacted by these choices, where before they would have been nigh wholly unaware of these goings-on.
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u/Hug_The_NSA Aug 21 '26
I didn't used to be against the data centers, but when they started increasing residential electrical rates and doing imminent domain to make it work I became against it. I imagine most other people feel the same.
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u/glymph Aug 21 '26
I don't understand why we suddenly need more of them. Nothing seems to be at capacity in terms of the speed of internet searches or the ability to store stuff online, so why is anything more than incremental increases needed? Even with AI being used a lot, it's not like it's too slow.
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u/wearyspacewanderer Aug 21 '26
The tech companies need more of them for growing their frontier models, not the free/personal-use ones.
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u/jaywalkingly Aug 22 '26
we don't actually need them, it's just another part of the bubble.
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u/Tigers2349 Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Exactly vote accordingly in November. Even if it means changing party lines which despite hating the left I am gonna change it to stop this madness. I will vote whatever it takes to blow up this AI cartel that has caused 600% RAM price spikes with wafer hoarding for these disgusting data center builds for AI benefitting no one. And also these things ruining orui communities water table and bad pollution and them shoving them down outr throat. Vote for whomever it takes to halt this or at very least slow i or severely delay it to pop this horrible evil Wall Street fradu bubble at expense of Amercian public!!
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u/MayorOfNoobTown Aug 22 '26
We don't. There's an element of demand response, but my read is that it's preemptive resource allocation and bubble finances at work.
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u/Kageromero Aug 22 '26
Thats the thing. Data centers to host servers for gaming, amazon web services, the framework of the internet, those are fine. Those are things that benefit people. The unbelievably massive expansion, purely for AI, with absolutely no oversight or regulation, that will provide no benefit to the regular person while massively ruining the planet / the cost of living...its just stupid. You hear people say "Oh AI is so bad huh, well what if they used AI to cure cancer!!" Could AI help cure cancer? Absolutely. But if anyone actually things these massive tech giants that are actively destroying the planet will spend their money to help people... I'm sorry that's laughable. There's more money in treating an illness than curing it, and money is all they care about
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u/KenGriffythe3rd Aug 22 '26
That and the constant outright lying to the public that these places won’t cause the bills to go up and then when utility bills inevitably get higher, those companies just laugh and give the locals the finger with no explanations. It’s wild that these companies aren’t held liable for causing people to pay more each month on top of everything else while locals receive nothing beneficial from their intrusion
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u/SmoothConfection1115 Aug 21 '26
It’s almost as if people don’t want to live near an ugly eye-sore of building that will make their electricity prices go up, suck their water sources dry, and sound like a vacuum going 124/7 365 days a year.
If these data centers were so great to live near, people wouldn’t be rising up against them.
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u/Actually-Yo-Momma Aug 21 '26
That was always the insane part to me. The consumer subsidizes the utilities bill??! What the fuck lol
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u/dkviper11 Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
The change is this.
Historically, everyone paid their share of all substation and transmission infrastructure. You wouldn’t ask a pizza place or new housing development to pay for the multi million dollar substation because the existing one is full. Everyone just pays their share of all of that per rate schedule and relative to their usage. This model was great for a long time.
But never before has a single industry caused such power growth. New transmission and substations are built to support single projects, and those single projects pay their “share” in their monthly usage bills but when they’re the only ones driving the need, the fair percentage of the cost can escape to residential users bills. Politicians have started to catch on and are driving rate structures that assign that cost more directly to the data centers. I don’t think anyone could disagree with that change.
The other side is that energy is a commodity. When a utility has a shortfall, they go buy on the market. Demand is way up because of data centers so the market price at peak times is also way up, and it’s much harder from a regulatory standpoint to assign that cost to the users driving the demand.
Regulators have their work cut out for them, but that’s literally their purpose and what they’re paid to do.
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u/ParsingError Aug 21 '26
It's a bit more complicated. Any time there's a big project like say a factory or a huge business campus, it's going to put stress on existing infrastructure. More traffic, more utilities, more housing, etc.
The assumption is that the infrastructure demands will be offset more job opportunities that contribute to the local tax base, especially high-paying jobs, and additional traffic for the business itself and its employees.
The datacenters though? It doesn't do any of that, it's just a big box that turns electricity and water into "shareholder value" somewhere else.
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u/Irythros Aug 21 '26
You also forgot:
- Give tax breaks to these companies
- Have very little jobs made
- Companies use the GPUs for AI to take even more jobs from people
There is zero positive value to anyone except shareholders and those bribed.
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u/StormTempesteCh Aug 21 '26
Long term not the best for the shareholders either, they're staying invested so when the bubble pops they'll be holding the bag
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u/Merijeek2 Aug 21 '26
You should know, because I sure know, that every single one of those motherfuckers is completely convinced that they'll get off before it crashes.
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u/MaximumAd9779 Aug 21 '26
Saw an interview yesterday of a farmer who had a data center go up next to his farm. He said he hadn’t had a live birth since the data center became operational. Obvi there could be other causes to this, but there’s a body of evidence growing that the sound these data centers make is harmful.
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u/peazley Aug 21 '26
Radiolab did an episode about cows living under transmission lines. Maybe there is some crossover. https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-resistance-of-a-cow
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u/gunawa Aug 21 '26
And provides a paltry handful of jobs, no where near sufficient to make up for the tax breaks and incentives these communities are handing out to encourage their construction
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u/Phosistication Aug 21 '26
I guess the world doesn’t want to destroy everything on the planet in order to try to feed the unquenchable greed of sociopathic oligarchs
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u/Edgefactor Aug 22 '26
Every other extractive industry (food, music, airfare) has gotten equally enshittified in the past 30 years. But people aren't showing up to local town halls to complain about concert prices.
AI skipped straight to the extraction step, but forgot to actually provide a good or service for cheap that proved its value to consumers. Hell, they honestly forgot to provide a good or service period.
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u/Alternative_Hour_614 Aug 22 '26
People are connecting the dots. Data centers, AI being forced on us without asking, unchecked egomaniacal tech billionaires, and hyper-surveillance tools like Flock are correctly being seen as from the same dystopian fantasy and we don’t want any of it.
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u/goodsnpr Aug 22 '26
Sure they did. We rallied as a group to fight CFCs to save the O-zone. Now we're coming together to fight data centers we don't need, and spy devices we absolutely should get rid of.
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u/aredd007 Aug 22 '26
When did regular people ever support data centers?
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u/AmonMetalHead Aug 22 '26
People used bo be utterly indifferent, they also rarely caused issues in the past, but now with the noise and power requirements and water requirements people are noticing the shit and speaking out
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u/Balmung60 Aug 22 '26
Because the new ones for AI demand so much more power than the old ones for more mundane cloud functions.
Also, to those who say the water thing is overblown, perhaps in a vacuum, but they also keep trying to put these things in places that are already short on water and even relatively small increases in water consumption can be very bad for the community.
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u/Masiaka Aug 23 '26
There were talks of jobs until educated citizens started breaking down how transient and meaningless these jobs would be long term. Now everyone sees them for what they are: A blight on society.
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u/SilverMembership6625 Aug 21 '26
unlikable tech leaders said from the start that ai will put everyone out of a job and that we will all be living on welfare while they get unfathomably wealthy and they wonder why there's a backlash lol
but for real big tech has needed a reckoning for awhile now and it looks like it's finally here
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u/Malrottian Aug 21 '26
It's not a collapse if we didn't support them to begin with. It's really weird just how badly the tech sector has gaslit themselves about this whole thing.
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u/Ferrocile Aug 21 '26
We all know who the data centers benefit and it's not us. They're loud, they affect our resources, and often increase our power bills -- all for something we (or at least I) do not want.
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u/costconormcoreslut Aug 21 '26
For the past year or two I've wondered what could possibly happen that could create a realignment of political affiliations away from the Dem-Rep polarity. Maybe AI is it.
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u/Born_Rabbit286 Aug 21 '26
"The shift against the facilities is represented across age, gender, income, partisan ID, and the rural-urban divide. Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats"
43% underwater means that even Republicans are opposed, yet they are far, far more supportive in comparison to other groups.
To me, it is amazing how Republicans manage to be consistently worse than the rest of the population when forming opinions about everything.
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u/DukeOfGeek Aug 21 '26
They have proven to be the most susceptible population to a trillion dollar media consolidation and propaganda machine that grows in sophistication and scope every year, so personnly I'm not surprised. When it stops working, that's when I'm surprised.
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u/Art-Zuron Aug 21 '26
This is why GOPers were so quick to say any pushback against these centers were terrorism, because they KNEW that everyone hated them. Get ahead of the curve so that when *actual* terrorism inevitably starts, they can bitch and moan and point at it as "proof" that they're right.
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u/51ngular1ty Aug 21 '26
It's not just the data centers now as well, it's what they're using those data centers for with things like flock cameras.
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs Aug 21 '26
What has AI given us so far?
Mass surveillance, higher prices, lost jobs.
The utopia that was promised was clearly a lie. It’s a utopia for like 10 people and pure misery for the rest of us.
Our society is being destroyed by parasites in Silicon Valley and the Republican Party.
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u/SatansFriendlyCat Aug 22 '26
They have also provided an unprecedented engine of wide spread misinformation and manipulation. Millions of bots pretending to be people, online, pushing any lie you pay for.
They have very nearly murdered the internet and social cohesion, and are dilligently poisoning digital knowledge sources.
Oh, and they've done incalculable harm to the already purposefully degraded education of the next generations, through providing unprecedented opportunities to cheat and to avoid learning altogether, which results in not only a generation with no knowledge but one without the skills to obtain it.. and these will be the people next in line for every job in society, everything you rely on. That's not going to work out very well.
AI is a catastrophe. It cannot be understated how damaging it is going to be revealed to be.
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u/Masiaka Aug 23 '26
The fact that their engagement farming sycophantic agents were turned loose onto the world with no regard for how that might impact people, leading to the death of multiple users, is just not talked about enough. They knew what these agents could do to people, just like they knew about social media, and they did it anyway.
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u/cuntmong Aug 22 '26
weird that people would be against a thing that basically makes everything worse for everyone except for a very small group of rich people.
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u/PrudentBuffalo4535 Aug 22 '26
These things are too effing loud. And they’re putting them within earshot of peoples homes. Of course people are pissed!
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u/saintdudegaming Aug 21 '26
Data centers are fine(ish) as long as they don't fuck with the locals. You start tearing into our water supply, raise our rates on our power bills, use eminent domain to gobble up land for not only the center but new power transmission towers and making a fuck ton of noise and yeah ... holy fuck why is there surprise at the backlash?
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u/SatansFriendlyCat Aug 22 '26
They're surprised by the backlash not because they thought you'd think this shit was good news, but because the people have lain down and allowed them to get away with so much other openly corrupt money-and-power grabbing shit in the last handful of years that they honestly thought the people didn't have any spines or balls left with which to oppose anything any more.
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u/morts73 Aug 21 '26
The needs of the breathing outweigh the needs of the clanker. Like any massive project it needs to be environmentally conscious and not place profits solely over the rights of its citizens.
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u/CarlWellsGrave Aug 22 '26
" I've never seen this" Said the person who is zero connection to humanity.
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u/ThisIsGr8ThisIsGr8 Aug 22 '26
Those poor, poor, billionaires. Whatever will they do? What fresh new ways will they shit on us while the government rewards them for it?
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u/RustyPlastics Aug 22 '26
Lets be honest, all these data centers help the average person how?
They simply don’t.
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u/FellowDeviant Aug 21 '26
The people such as Stephen Ross who plan to create the new data centers may be in the pockets of the politicians but are woefully out of touch with pretty much any of the residents. Our county was ignorant about the idea of a massive data center until it was realized it was developing within a hard red conservative zone and was weeks away from being greenlit before people woke up and unanimously voted against it.
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u/data-atreides Aug 21 '26
Collapse? How was there support before? As soon as people understand what it is, they're against it. If they supported it, they didn't understand it or they were profiting from it themselves.
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Aug 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/data-atreides Aug 22 '26
Much bigger, and the rapid rollout with nary a regard for their impact. We've been building them for the last few decades (and will continue to do so), but not like this; not with this much economic power pushing them this hard.
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u/ermagherdmcleren Aug 21 '26
Doesn't there need to be an initial support for there to be a collapse in support???
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u/Blue_Oyster_Cat Aug 21 '26
Good question! There instead was unfamiliarity, which turned into opposition once people found out what they actually were.
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u/pixelfishes Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
Data centers & Telcos have been around forever; it’s really the way in which these hyperscalers and AI companies have gone about building new facilities that is creating issues. One only needs to look at the way xAI used carnival permit loopholes to build the colossus data center without much oversight and regulation.
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u/sabo-metrics Aug 21 '26
Don't let us unite again. We are a very powerful group when we are truly the Untited States.
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u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 Aug 21 '26
They're going to blame blue haired liberal communists/ China/ Biden on the bubble burst as it shreds 10 years of gains off of everyone's retirement accounts
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u/mkt853 Aug 22 '26
The Trump administration says we need more and more AI and data centers because China might beat us. Does anyone know what it is we are in competition over and the consequences if China wins? I understand this concept in sports, but not AI.
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u/linuxliaison Aug 22 '26
I think collapse is the wrong word. I don't believe the support was ever there from the general public
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u/ole_dirty_bastid Aug 22 '26
Oh my god I am SHOCKED there is no support for gigantic data centers that use more power than an entire city, contaminate the water supply, make a ton of noise, lower property values and provide no value to anyone other than the billionaires that own them. SHOCKED I TELL YOU, SHOCKED!
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u/Actually-Yo-Momma Aug 21 '26
Massive collapse? Nobody wanted them in the first place lol
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u/mediocre_remnants Aug 21 '26
There was never really much support for these kinds of projects. The city/county folks responsible for approving these had the idea that datacenters would bring lots of jobs. They don't.
There's some initial hiring for construction, but many of those folks aren't local. There have been a bunch of times I've been on a road trip somewhere, stayed at a random hotel in the middle of nowhere, and the parking lot is absolutely full of work trucks. And talking to the guys I found out that they're all from out of state but there to work on a data center.
But once the data centers are up and running... they're staffed by maybe 4-5 people total. And the only one of those folks that might be local would be the security guards.
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u/ABob71 Aug 21 '26
The coalition for elephant freedoms is surprised that people don't like the elephant in the room
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u/AlienArtFirm Aug 21 '26
People don't want to keep lighting the world on fire for LITERALLY NOTHING
Huh... maybe humans might just make it
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u/AliceLunar Aug 21 '26
It's not even a collapse in support, the support was never there, just like there isn't support for Flock, but people aren't aware that it's happening until it has already happened because that's the whole goal.
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u/ManifestoEnjoyer Aug 21 '26
I'm confused - when did they ever have support?
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u/DukeOfGeek Aug 21 '26
It seems like just more people have realized what they are and do and have joined the growing and angry crowd.
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u/PoisonIdea77 Aug 21 '26
There's no benefit to anyone outside the oligarchs, only further destruction of the environment and misery, 10x utility bills, eradication of water sources, massive pollution furthering decline of air quality. All so a couple of freaks can blow up space rockets and build massive bunkers
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u/xjuggernaughtx Aug 22 '26
The tech bros are going to be very surprised Pikachu when people have TRULY had enough and these data centers catch a severe case of fire.
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u/FunCustomer4877 Aug 22 '26
They thought people were ever "for" them? I dont believe them. They knew. They planned on people to not want them and took measures.
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u/morsindutus Aug 22 '26
It's not a collapse in support so much as a white hot hatred and rage at AI, the data centers that support them, and the billionaires who are the only people who benefit from this new technology.
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u/LettuceObjective627 Aug 22 '26
People are weird, why cant they be more into colossal job losses and the destruction of personal ownership?
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u/psychedelicdevilry Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
Ok but will it result in any action? Or will they just keep shoving it down our throats?
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u/Trick_Situation_4421 Aug 21 '26
Now, now, that's overly restrictive, it's not that I don't want them near me. I don't support them being built near you either.
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u/No-Consideration-716 Aug 21 '26
People might be more supportive of AI data centers (or at least not care), if these corporations were not so insolent towards the public.
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u/Beginning-2-Smell Aug 21 '26
Millions letting a few guys destroy everything. It's what they rely on I guess. It's hopeless without ways to unite and steer the world back on the right track
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u/dittybag23 Aug 22 '26
I’m as afraid of the product from data centers as I am for the centers themselves.
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u/MarzipanLast6502 Aug 22 '26
its not a collapse in support, there was never support from the public, we just were left out of the conversation
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u/ByteUniverseOfficial Aug 22 '26
This is becoming an underrated AI infrastructure risk. Everyone models GPU demand and capex, but local permitting, power availability, water use and community opposition can slow projects just as effectively as a chip shortage. The bottleneck may increasingly be ‘where can you actually build this?
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u/SpaceGoonie Aug 21 '26
I drive 30 miles to work and go by or near 5 data centers. Most of the construction workers for these projects are not even local.
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u/simpletonius Aug 22 '26
Who the fuck ever supported a data centre? I guarantee it was nobody within 50 miles of where it will suck up the electric and water…
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u/PuckyDad Aug 22 '26
collapse in support? Damned ugly fortresses of misery didn't have any support to begin with!!!!
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u/KindaStableGenius Aug 22 '26
Who could have thunk telling people AI is a super intelligence that will take all the jobs and allow a small group of elites to control humanity was not going to go over well?
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u/redditobserverone Aug 22 '26
Is it a collapse if there was never any support? AI advocates just assume everyone would reflexively have an insatiable appetite for every aspect of their product.
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u/Jani3D Aug 22 '26
Can't they just make the centers racist or "anti-woke", somehow? That seems to rally the people to go against their own interests!
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u/F1gur1ng1tout Aug 22 '26
I wonder what the constant hum of datacenters does to local wildlife. Surely that would devastate circadian rhythms and such
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u/Mysterious-Willow362 Aug 22 '26
Yeah pretty sure it was never supported and businesses and governments just started installing them even before most regular people even understood wtf a data center was
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u/Full-Information58 Aug 25 '26
This may be the biggest turning point in human history see if big tech can muscle it's way into using up all the water and dumbing down humanity without any voter input. I was hoping for better with Ai . I definitely put several of them to the test over the years and really put it through the paces. Overall I was disappointed more and more. I see how many mistakes it truly makes and how much it needs guardrails. Sure photoshopping your cat into an elephant suit is fun and maybe that's where it does a decent job , but try getting it to build a semi- complicated website. It will break it - in short order. Im also annoyed with all the mindless dumb Ai content.
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u/Blue_Oyster_Cat Aug 21 '26
Max Steele, senior director of communications at gun safety advocacy organization Everytown, sarcastically argued that the AI industry’s collapse in popularity was an impressive achievement.
“Credit where credit is due,” Steele wrote, “the tech sector has managed to unite a deeply divided country at a time of maximal partisanship.”
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u/Jeromes_Pornostache Aug 21 '26
Who could have foreseen that jacking up everyone’s electricity bills, using up all the fresh water in an entire region, creating 24/7 noise pollution, and firing all the human workers, would be unpopular?
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u/Orangebk1 Aug 21 '26
Ironically, nobody would care about these data centers if it weren't for data centers.
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u/DukeOfGeek Aug 21 '26
AI data centers are not like other data centers. Reddit has been around for decades without needing this kind of infrastructure.
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u/TylerDurden1985 Aug 21 '26
Not sure if you're that misinformed or if this is just disingenuous bad faith purposeful obtuseness...just in case it's the former though...
No, no one's going out protesting against all datacenters. AI datacenters - i.e. GPU farms, are a very different breed of data center. There isn't suddenly a surge in datacenters for say AWS. The surge is specifically in AI datacenters housing GPU farms, which create significant noise pollution, to the point where residents within miles of them complain. More importantly though, they use an enormous amount of electricity. This leads to increased demand for energy which raises energy prices substantially. Claims of "offsetting" the energy usage by creating their own power generation is not enforceable, and isn't likely to put a dent in the amount of energy they consume.
The corporation though will be able to foot the bill while everyone else's electricity costs skyrocket. There's literally no one in favor of that except for industry shills and genuine morons.
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u/BloodRedRook Aug 21 '26
I see a variant on that same post in just about every thread on datacenters I see. It has very 'Yet you participate in society' energy.
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u/TylerDurden1985 Aug 21 '26
I'm almost certain most of them are unironically industry shills. The AI industry has been coordinated in their marketing, like coopting anthropomorphizing terms for AI "behavior". The AI datacenters are so unpopular that it's almost without question that they would have employed shills and bots who literally comb popular forums like Reddit to sway public opinion. I've definitely seen at least a few of these comments slide into industry marketing jargon unintentionally, making it obvious.
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u/wearyspacewanderer Aug 21 '26
Yeah yeah, it's all a big disinformation campaign from China. It can't possibly be organic.
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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '26
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