US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

3/5/2026 at 3:23:41 PM

The training data commons is to AI what oil reserves are to petroleum economies: a collectively generated resource of immense commercial value. Every book written, every forum post answered, every photo shared, every line of code contributed... billions of people built the knowledge base that makes these models work. Without that collective human output, AI is nothing.

Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

We are in exactly that window right now with AI. The resource is being extracted at an incredible pace and almost all the value is flowing to a handful of companies. The longer people wait to assert sovereign ownership over the collective intelligence that makes AI possible, the harder it becomes.

If you think this is crazy, ask yourself what’s actually crazier: demanding a share of the value built on your collective labor, or watching trillions of dollars get extracted from it and saying nothing.

the idea of Alaskans getting a check just for existing sounded crazy too, right up until it didn’t.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 10:25:57 PM

> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].

AI has a great potential like this too..

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

by bgnn

3/5/2026 at 3:28:42 PM

if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.

But the model is built on us. You can move the server anywhere you want. You can’t escape the fact that everything inside it came from human minds. That’s an ownership claim no one can relocate away from.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 5:41:20 PM

There is no us, there is only you, by default.

To move beyond that default you need to organize into things like communities, lobbying groups, and/or even governments.

Ownership of singular non-physical objects is a polite lie we tell ourselves because it makes us feel more secure in a universe filled with information chaos. The moment you open your mouth or move your pen you no longer own what is in your mind, it is now entropy. Lose control of that entropy and it now belongs to anyone with the proper tooling to record it. This is a universal law of information, it is beyond the laws of men and their fickle will.

Much like we build on information from our past generations, AI will build its own new information on those foundations. And since AI is an entity of information alone it is highly probable it will do it far better than we will and forever cement us in a prison of our own making.

by pixl97

3/5/2026 at 6:00:05 PM

No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality.

Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code.

Calling information "entropy" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on.

You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them.

You don't get it both ways.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 6:13:00 PM

(not intending ot be snarky, but this isn't my area of knowledge in the least.) Didn't the AI organizations 'get it both ways' when they trained on vast collection of works under copyright and then purely "own' the outcome?

by vibrio

3/5/2026 at 6:21:25 PM

That's not snarky at all, that's exactly the point. They did get it both ways.

The comment I was responding to argued that ownership of non-physical things is basically a "polite lie" and that information is just entropy that belongs to whoever can capture it. My point was that the AI companies clearly don't believe that when it applies to them. They patent their architectures, copyright their outputs, sue competitors for IP violations, and lock down their model weights. They fully believe in ownership of non-physical things.

But when it comes to the billions of people whose work they trained on? Suddenly information is free-flowing entropy that belongs to no one.

That's the asymmetry at the heart of this. The rules around IP apparently apply when it protects their profits, but not when it would obligate them to share those profits with the people whose work made them possible. Which is exactly why the public needs to assert a claim now, before that asymmetry gets any more entrenched.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 6:26:00 PM

Addition:

Also worth knowing: collective intellectual property already exists. ASCAP and BMI have been doing exactly this for decades. Individual songwriters can't enforce their rights every time their music gets played, so they pool their IP, license it collectively, and distribute the revenue. The problem they solved is almost identical to the training data problem. Each individual contribution is tiny, but the collective value is enormous. Applying this at the scale of the general public would be novel, but the underlying mechanism isn't. The concept works. It just hasn't been applied to training data yet.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 8:05:18 PM

I mean, the AI companies want it this way, but the same laws of information apply to them too. They can patent whatever they want, but as we see other nations use their models to distill information to other models with almost nothing they can do about it.

Patents, copyright, lawsuits are all post ad hoc actions which mean the milk has already been stolen. And it only works if the rule of law is something that is respected, that's not going so well lately.

We are seeing this in that there is little to no moat between the models, nearly everyone with the needed compute seems to catch up pretty quickly. And when said rivalries cross national boarders the only solution to these problems quickly becomes violence.

With how information works AI wins this game in the long run. Individual humans scale poorly and their ability to individually acquire information is a slow process. Looking at this on a company by company basis is not the proper way to show how the future with models is going to play out.

by pixl97

3/5/2026 at 8:32:36 PM

> if you assert ownership over physical infrastructure, the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space.

This is the same false threat that gets repeated over and over whenever anyone tries to regulate or tax anything.

by gwerbin

3/5/2026 at 5:07:44 PM

> the data centers just move to another country or eventually to space

The same line of reasoning that purports billionaires will flee if their taxes go up.

Spoiler alert: they don't.

Also, data centers in space is not a serious idea. It's been beaten to death that this isn't economical. People like Musk are proposing that as a possibility for the sole reason of keeping regulation away. "Well if you regulate us we will just move into space". They won't because they can't because physics.

by rybosworld

3/5/2026 at 5:42:15 PM

Ah yes, we'll depend on the democratic nations of the free world to protect our rights over the billionaires.

looks at the US

Well, looks like we lost that.

by pixl97

3/5/2026 at 4:15:58 PM

You can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.

by terminalshort

3/5/2026 at 4:36:39 PM

Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak.

But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value."

your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle.

Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 7:23:44 PM

Typically you don't get compensated for secondary or higher order value generated by your work. Every software startup today is only possible because of the massive amount of collective effort to build the computing hardware that it runs on and the work to construct the actual physical network of the internet. But that doesn't mean that you have to pay all those people for that work just because your company ends up making billions. Or you could say that actually the company does pay those people indirectly through all the economic activity and tax revenue generated. AI is the same. No special rules are needed.

by terminalshort

3/5/2026 at 4:39:25 PM

How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible?

Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.

by ajam1507

3/5/2026 at 10:30:54 PM

Purely anecdotal I know of a fair few creatives who ultimately are just happy people enjoy their works and don't really care how they're getting it. I understand that's a privileged attitude in the current world as they are all living relatively comfortable lives but at least philosophically I agree with it. We as humans have done a lot to reduce scarcity for a great deal many things but we still cling to it as an idea because of stubbornness and greed.

Maybe I'll get labeled a 'commie' for saying all this but I think we create a world where everyones needs are met and things(information & media are the easiest imo) are freely available. Thinking we can't do this is a bit of a disservice to the capabilities of humans.

by hntway5994

3/5/2026 at 3:50:24 PM

Can't really do that for AI. What you gonna do, tax their use of scraped data ? How would even that be implemented ?

by PunchyHamster

3/5/2026 at 3:55:32 PM

The same way Alaska taxes oil extraction. Alaska doesn't track which molecule of oil came from which acre. They don't audit every drop. They tax the extraction operation and collect royalties on the resource being pulled out of the ground. We know who is training large models. We know roughly what data they're using. We know their revenue. A compute tax on large training runs, a revenue royalty on foundation model companies, or a licensing fee above a certain data threshold... none of these require tracking individual data points. They require taxing the extraction operation, which is visible, measurable, and already being monitored to some degree for safety purposes. We already have a very analogous model in the form of oil and Alaska.

Edit: to clarify, this wouldn't be a tax. A tax is the government taking a cut of someone else's money. A royalty is the owner charging for access to their resource. Alaska doesn't tax Exxon for drilling. It charges Exxon for extracting something that belongs to the people. Same principle here.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 3:50:31 PM

We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”

by jdross

3/5/2026 at 4:01:42 PM

A tax takes a percentage of value that someone else created. A royalty collects payment for access to something you already own. When Alaska collects from oil companies, it's not taxing their profits. It's charging them for extracting a resource that belongs to the people of Alaska. The oil was never theirs.

It being a royalty and not a tax is the reason Alaska's dividend is politically untouchable while tax-funded programs get gutted every budget cycle. Ownership is a fundamentally stronger claim than redistribution.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 5:02:43 PM

> if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value

Isn't that how communism (should have) worked?

by baxtr

3/5/2026 at 5:14:39 PM

Alaska and Norway aren't communist. They're capitalist economies with thriving private sectors. Oil companies still operate, still profit, still compete. The public just gets a share of the value extracted from a collectively owned resource.

The Alaska Permanent Fund has been running since 1982 inside the most conservative state in America. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the largest on earth and their economy is doing fine.

These models work.. work well... And they exist comfortably within mixed market economies.

The question is whether the public gets a cut when private companies build fortunes on a collectively generated resource, or whether they don't. We already know the answer can be yes without anything breaking.

Our entire white collar system might be a house of cards with AI, what I am proposing is a safe hedge against a future with potentially massive wealth inequality, and increased unemployment. But this isn't just about protection from injury... people should BENEFIT massively.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 5:34:15 PM

ok, fair enough. I think I misread your first comment.

not sure if that would work in this case since all these companies scraped (publicly) available data? So with the right resources anyone could redo it?

by baxtr

3/5/2026 at 6:09:13 PM

Well, two things worth considering.

First, training isn't a one-time event. These companies are continuously scraping new data, training new model generations, ingesting new human output. Every new model is a new extraction event. The fact that GPT-4 already trained on your 2022 blog post doesn't mean the window is closed. GPT-6 will train on your 2025 and 2026 output too. There's always a live point at which to assert a collective claim.

Likely - these models will always be training on us to better understand us and continue to be of value to us commercially.

Second, "anyone could redo it with the right resources" is technically true but practically meaningless. Anyone could theoretically drill for oil too. The barrier was never access to the crude sitting in the ground. It was the billions in infrastructure needed to extract and refine it. Same here. The data is public, but the compute required to turn it into a frontier model costs billions. That concentration of capital is exactly why a public claim on the value makes sense, just like it did with oil.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 4:35:05 PM

This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is.

Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption.

The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?

I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.

In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.

If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 4:40:32 PM

It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat.

Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit.

How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.

Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.

by shimman

3/5/2026 at 4:52:41 PM

Democratize means to make something available to everyone.

I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government...

So to reframe my argument for clarity;

I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 5:02:30 PM

No that is not what democratize means, how asinine. You aren't giving anything away for free, you're fucking the commons for monetary gain.

I'm having a hard time understanding why you think it's okay for SV to steal from humanity then profit off of our knowledge? In which universe is this democratic? Why is this something we have to accept? I don't accept it at all, the vast majority of Americans don't accept it.

This is just neoliberalism with flame decals.

These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR, why do you think all the LLM companies are trying to force these tools through corporate mandates that have been falling? Why do you think LLM companies are chasing after lucrative corporate welfare in the form of government contracts lasting from years to decades?

For a technology that sure billed as useful sure is struggling hard to find paying customers.

Why do you think people are protesting data center buildouts? Why do you think the vast majority of Americans hate big tech and SV? Look at who the most hated people are in America, it's nearly all of big tech leadership.

Get out of your bubble.

I have never seen a product that has to have a company mandate to use it or lose your job. Usually products that are useful and productive don't need a company mandate for adoption.

by shimman

3/5/2026 at 10:06:49 PM

> No that is not what democratize means, how asinine.

You're wrong, and are getting upset with GP over your own lack of vocabulary.

> democratize (verb)

> [...]

> 2. [+ object] formal : to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something)

> * The magazine's goal is to democratize art.

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/democratize

by Ajedi32

3/5/2026 at 5:19:42 PM

>why do you think all the LLM companies are trying to force these tools through corporate mandates that have been falling

Ironically if you actually read that study, the "MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing", they found that almost everyone was using AI tools they paid for.

>While official enterprise initiatives remain stuck on the wrong side of the GenAI Divide, employees are already crossing it through personal AI tools. This "shadow AI" often delivers better ROI than formal initiatives and reveals what actually works for bridging the divide. Behind the disappointing enterprise deployment numbers lies a surprising reality: AI is already transforming work, just not through official channels. Our research uncovered a thriving "shadow AI economy" where employees use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude subscriptions, and other consumer tools to automate significant portions of their jobs, often without IT knowledge or approval. The scale is remarkable. While only 40% of companies say they purchased an official LLM subscription, workers from over 90% of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every single person used an LLM in some form for their work. In many cases, shadow AI users reported using LLMs multiples times a day every day of their weekly workload through personal tools, while their companies' official AI initiatives remained stalled in pilot phase [1]

If you want to avoid info bubbles, read the reports, not just headlines and comments.

[1]https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus... Section 3.3

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 5:14:34 PM

> These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR

Time to leave whatever bubble you live in. These are some of the most popular apps on the market today. It's incredibly popular.

by abletonlive

3/5/2026 at 5:37:36 PM

They're new and shiny, but hollow and empty. People like playing with them, seeing what they can do, but the glitz will wear off the moment they stop pumping more into it.

The instant people feel like "AI" isn't fun, the whole thing dies.

by BizarroLand

3/5/2026 at 9:01:03 PM

You're projecting so hard that Epson is going to reach out and ask you how you're accomplishing it

by abletonlive

3/5/2026 at 5:13:10 PM

> anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.

Sorry what? Authors are gatekeepers to what? Their books that they wrote and now will never get paid for cuz the LLM ripped it?

by bix6

3/5/2026 at 5:48:40 PM

Considering that books have probably been the easiest thing to pirate for the last 30 years, and LLMs are probably the worst way to try and read a book free, I'm not sure why authors would be focusing their anger at AI.

Many books you can even get free at a library....

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 5:07:34 PM

Price doesn't matter. Using communal resources for private gain - without the consent of the creators even - is wrong, full stop. It's the same reason that publishers making billions selling access to scientific research that tax dollars funded is wrong.

As to prices: look at power bills, RAM prices, appliance prices, and prices of anything with microchips. Consumers are paying a lot more than $20/month for this slop.

by Arainach

3/5/2026 at 5:29:59 PM

If it's slop, why do they pay for it?

I mean, raise you hand if you have never paid for AI "slop", I see maybe a hand or two in this room of tens of thousands.

It's a strawman to frame it as AI labs get everything and society gets nothing. Bruh, the fastest growing applications of all time didn't explode in popularity because they "offer nothing of value". I'm not giving you an argument, I'm giving you a reality check.

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 6:06:37 PM

Congratulations, you ignored all the substance in my post and focused on one word.

by Arainach

3/5/2026 at 6:21:33 PM

The gain isn't private though, that's the point. If people weren't gaining from LLMs, why would they be paying for it?

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 6:42:06 PM

The users aren't the ones getting trillion dollar valuations. And for most of them the answer is "they don't have a choice, it's bundled into Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace / Meta / everything" or "they're not, their employer is paying for it".

The answer to "why do businesses pay for stupid things of questionable hard-to-prove value based on hype cycles" would take many books.

by Arainach

3/5/2026 at 6:00:03 PM

> Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome

Average people who wants to go home from work and game are angry at AI for raising the ram prices.

Average person who wants to own the stuff and not have things on cloud are angry at AI for raising prices 5 times in such a short period of time.

Have you talked to an average person and how they use AI? They use it as a glorified no-code editor (I would admit not no-code editor itself but rather the vibe-coding aspects with no regards to what tech stack is being used, how its being deployed, literally anythoing) and search engine. Refer to how things like lovable etc.

A search engine which can make some pretty wrong cases which can literally lead to near death like scenarios all while being completely trust me bro attitude.

A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every brain cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

Normal people use AI to confide in it secrets, seek therapy somehow. And the same AI generates AI pyschosis.

Now coming to tech industry: Tech industry is worried about that such levels of democratization just means that nobody is going to pay for them yet at the same time, we will see projects who are completely created by AI seek money. It's this weird mush where if you are a genuine guy who just loved computing, who loved tinkering, yeah we're offloading that capability to AI

I have seen this even more and more with as agents want to get more autonomous or we are letting them be. The projects generated feel hollow to me. I don't consider myself a full fledged programmer right now and AI did supercharge me and made me have projects. Nowadays, it just feels like prompt ---> (Time) --> Output.

It just feels hollow and AI companies did it by abusing the passion of these same developers and scraping stack overflow, scraping github and having all disregards for properties.

People could spend years creating a book about say postgres and an AI took it, ripped it in half and then decided to use that info and not even give credits.

All, at the same time that AI is being pushed down on employees. Some just don't want to have it but nope, they must. they are forced.

Essentially engineering with AI feels like it becomes a marketing gimmick. Anyone who can market somehow (Ahem ahem Openclaw) can get a job at OpenAi all because in some attention hype breeds hype and they had stars and people talked about stars on twitter, and more people found it and starred it and so on and started using it

Turns out that nowadays there are allegations being made against Openclaw

> Star velocity shocked analysts. Moreover, the repository added roughly 220,000 stars within 84 days of launch. In contrast, Kubernetes needed five years for similar numbers. Many builders call the growth organic. Nevertheless, some observers link the surge to hype, bot accounts, and headline attention, fueling the GitHub Stars Controversy. Independent GitHub Archive pulls show several single-day jumps above 25,000 stars. Such abrupt spikes often signal scripted starring, yet no formal audit confirms abuse. These patterns feed community debate. Consequently, trust in the star metric has weakened, prompting calls for verification.

https://www.aicerts.ai/news/openclaws-github-stars-controver...

The marketing industry has been very closely linked to sometimes scam prone areas and shady areas of the internet and engineering used to be clean from all of this for the most part. Now, the norm to me feels like buy github stars and buy twitter attention or pray to be in an algorithm which you can't read but it reads every move you make, and yes this is your business strategy now

Have you looked at truly AI-first companies and what they do/like how do they generate numbers in the first place?

These are two distinct points. I don't think that people of here would be any mad if someone made a little prototyping script for themselves with the power of this Phd that you mention. Heck, these same programmers that you now call gatekeepers have never gatekeeped much of it. They worked and contributed to open source for free while being severely undermainted.

The audacity to call these same people gatekeepers shockens me because open source people if anything are the Opposite of that and yet AI stole their rights and their licenses from them. An AI can take AGPL code and then somehow churn it into MIT tada! It doesn't even have to give any accredits when it gets trained on AGPL or ANY type of code, no matter how restrictive or permissive.

these are the same people btw who are on programming forums which yes at times did have moderation issue but still tried to help noobs learn for free. They did it because they loved tinkering with computers

That's my take on it. feel free to ask for more things if you may as I would love to tell you more but for the sake of this discussion, I think enough can be relevant.

It's absolutely ironical to call say the Open source people gatekeepers because AI violated their rights and licenses.

Calling Open source Contributors gatekeepers might as well be an oxymoron.

Edit: I have been downvoted in so little time after I wrote this comment that I am pretty sure that someone might not have even read my comment and had it downvoted.

The topic can be at times too polarizing to even have a discussion.

Oh well. That's completely okay but to any human who read this, I know my writing can be sporadic and it was written in much frustration over how people try to frame AI as this harbingers of liberty. I absolutely think that's not the case and its viewing things from a very rose tinted glasses.

So thanks to all the humans who read my comment and were patient haha!

I really appreciate this patience in a world of TLDR and I wish you to have a nice day!

by Imustaskforhelp

3/5/2026 at 5:33:02 PM

> How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.

You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep ownership.

This is in addition to the billions in PR already being spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and economic costs.

by GrinningFool

3/5/2026 at 7:47:17 PM

Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting data centers being built in their communities.

What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans organizing with one another.

by shimman

3/5/2026 at 5:45:59 PM

> vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize

Lol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a continuous attack against the idea of nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the population. Us the population have already lost a war we had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far longer game than most of us.

by pixl97

3/5/2026 at 5:11:08 PM

> This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is

Paying for access to information is not democracy

by jklinger410

3/5/2026 at 5:52:44 PM

Plenty of free models you can run on your own hardware. I don't think those are going away either

by WarmWash

3/5/2026 at 5:00:50 PM

I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold.

AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict.

Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits.

The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.

by drooby

3/5/2026 at 5:31:47 PM

  > a personal PhD

Come on, spare us OpenAI's PR bullshit.

by orphea

3/5/2026 at 5:27:35 PM

> In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.

So your understanding of the present state is that we are living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it called AI slop?

I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want to know, did I or other people have say it or not?

A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the employment/livelihood of those same people into risks

Sir, does that sound familiar?

> I get the gatekeepers are pissed

No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)

by Imustaskforhelp

3/5/2026 at 5:01:14 PM

But AI is absolutely an incinerator of knowledge.

A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic.

What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness.

The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.

by filoeleven

3/5/2026 at 5:00:51 PM

>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?

The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.

by vannevar

3/5/2026 at 12:14:53 PM

which means nothing

because no one believes there are legal consequences if they don't

and there are a lot of ways to doge it even if there where a reliable government in place

like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dogeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).

by dathinab

3/5/2026 at 2:21:35 PM

Similar to the “carbon neutral by X date” promises, this was common around 2016 or so. Notice how companies have mostly cancelled or redefined those promises several years later, once the issue is out of the limelight.

If it is not legally required, it will not be done.

by SamuelAdams

3/5/2026 at 3:51:10 PM

Also the fucking carbon credits. "Hey, we paid someone that's actually carbon neutral, we're carbon neutral now!"

by PunchyHamster

3/5/2026 at 3:01:58 PM

I shall henceforth do the right thing.

Blinded by greed, I have never done it before, but I have seen the light, the bright future that we are all building toward.

From this day forth, I shall be righteous.

In your name, all good things come.

Hallelujah.

by onlyrealcuzzo

3/5/2026 at 2:47:41 PM

There are definitely social consequences if they don't. So far, if you were to look at it, a lot of Not In My Backyard groups have decided to reject data centers within their area because of sound complaints that were never fixed, environmental complaints that were never taken care of, as well as the fact that the electric bill would likely go up.

There's a lot of data centers that are not being built because they're not fixing it. The trend is going to continue. The hate for AI is going to grow. You basically have a lot of people that will vote a lot of people into office to take down all AI progress inside the United States if they don't fix their problems.

It'll be cool to shit on big tech as a politician.

by kanddle

3/5/2026 at 1:13:09 PM

>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).

And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.

I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.

Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.

And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.

by cucumber3732842

3/5/2026 at 2:16:11 PM

I promise you, the City Engineer is aware of the bullshit. You catch a whiff, but they live in the stink. It's been clear for a while that there's conflicting interests and the only real way to fix it is to change incentives. However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from removing lead from gas.

by alphawhisky

3/5/2026 at 4:53:23 PM

>However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from removing lead from gas.

I'm more than insinuating it. The cause may be noble but the state and local implementations have been perverted by all the minutia and business interests and NIMBYism. I would go so far as to say that (state and local implementation of requirements within) the clean water act is a non-negligible contributor to the decline of manufacturing and agriculture in the northeast and upper midwest.

We basically took "thou shalt not dump for that is bad for our surface and ground water" and over 50yr turned it into a blank check for all manner of leeches to make a buck and all manner of NIMBYs to make things unnecessarily expensive.

Petty 1.5-acre "I want my lightly forested former field to be a field again" and "business is going great I want my gavel parking lot paved" being stalled by five figure costs and even with those costs incurred it doesn't guarantee compliance. That's a far cry from the "yeah we just dump this stuff in a settling pond, IDK where it goes after that but man that river over there sure is a weird color" type 1960s industry behavior that it was meant to really curb. And the big industrial offenders still get to do what they want, not as bad as before of course, but still bad. Some Megacorp's runoff might turn the fish neon green or their 1k unit condo development might turn the river brown with silt but of course they'll be right there with their lawyers and experts who'll tell you why it's fine even when it's not to anyone with a brain and two eyeballs. The layman can't pay off people like that be on their side and neither can the regulators. (I assume this frequent fact pattern what you refer to by "living in the stink")

I think it ought to be revamped at the state and local level into something that's substantially more "results based" rather than the proactive red tape "make the bureaucrats feel like their ass is covered if someone ever complains about what they approved" based system we have now.

(And just to be clear for any readers who aren't familiar, the clean water act basically doesn't do much to affect the average person or business at a federal level. The local implementations and all the key definitions, industry standards, etc, are where the rubber really meets the road)

Edit: Basically I'm saying that in the past 50yr the interests the CWA was supposed to stymie learned how to pay their way around it, the parties who make a buck doing that have gotten themselves all but written into the compliance process to the detriment of the interests the CWA was supposed to not seriously burden. It needs to be replaced or revised to solve those two big problems.

by cucumber3732842

3/5/2026 at 3:28:50 PM

> gonna fuck over any endangered frogs

Extinction is forever -- your frustration, and that committee process, does not compare directly to species extinction.

by mistrial9

3/5/2026 at 4:18:45 PM

you care, and i care, and i think even the person you're replying to cares; that's great, but the people involved in the business of making these decisions treat them as a matter of procedure.

as long as the boxes are checked, most public sector employees are not going to stick their neck out. it's steady work that pays all right and has great benefits (and even pensions sometimes). a lot of people in the public sector aren't willing to step out of line for "frogs" even when they should or want to.

by GuinansEyebrows

3/5/2026 at 5:07:17 PM

The system optimized for these people.

So you get some guy approving some megacorps project because "well it says here that they've tested the stuff and the liquid mercury is below the <cites EPA mumbo jumbo" and giving farmer Johnson the runaround on some land clearing because farmer Johnson's project isn't worth spending $30k on civil engineering to have someone use "the right words" to say "I'm not gonna muddy up the river" and while the guy in the office knows what farmer Johnson means, he can't approve the project without sticking his neck out and so he doesn't.

It must be nice to live in a desert state where every 3rd parcel isn't "within regulatory range" of "wetlands" (most people don't know how expansive that word is).

by cucumber3732842

3/5/2026 at 6:05:32 PM

trust me, this happens even in dense, deep blue places like Seattle and LA.

by GuinansEyebrows

3/5/2026 at 9:24:02 PM

I never said it didn't.

Something something the more numerous the laws...

by cucumber3732842

3/5/2026 at 1:15:05 PM

[dead]

by nine_zeros

3/5/2026 at 1:39:02 PM

[flagged]

by ilovechaz

3/5/2026 at 1:52:59 PM

>"commies"

Who are those may I ask?

by FpUser

3/5/2026 at 1:59:34 PM

The famous communists of hacker news. sigh.

If you are in the US, and are not fascist, I urge you to leave. You are in an equivalent of 1933 germany. It is gonna be dangerous to not bend for the great leader.

by malka1986

3/5/2026 at 2:14:20 PM

[flagged]

by ilovechaz

3/5/2026 at 2:33:10 PM

We are creating the final boss of tragedy of the commons.

I used to think we were progressing up an exciting tech tree. That seems naive now.

Water, land, energy, the soundscape, intellectual property that incentivizes the dissemination of good ideas, digital networks of information and self-expression, perhaps even the economic value of expertise itself are all being sacrificed in the now for promises of utopia in the future.

Precious eggs to give to those promising a utopian omelet, eventually.

by randusername

3/5/2026 at 11:40:46 AM

> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses

Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else

by throwaw12

3/5/2026 at 12:15:07 PM

LOL, they just introduced QoS into the electricity grid.

by Propelloni

3/5/2026 at 1:45:45 PM

That concept was effectively already available. Hospitals tend to have multiple grid hookups before falling back on local generation.

by Arubis

3/5/2026 at 2:59:07 PM

Always has been.

by mikkupikku

3/5/2026 at 12:10:40 PM

So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?

by thegreatpeter

3/5/2026 at 12:34:52 PM

Let's make some assumptions first:

1. DCs must be built anyway

2. You can't take away energy from households

(3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion)

based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like you need to apply

Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing

by throwaw12

3/5/2026 at 3:58:16 PM

Many problems with it:

* power generation is not local in most of the cases. You'd be still fucking energy market to anyone outside it

* power is also used by companies people actually want. Even if household power cost wont chance thanks to that approach, the price for power for every single business around will increase.

* similarly any other manufacturing business will cost more. In essence, the AI boom will reduce profit margin of every single business that has electric power as significant cost in the production. Which is a lot of industries.

"Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise. Unless we start outright denying connection to power grid but that's pretty dangerous political precedent to set.

by PunchyHamster

3/5/2026 at 4:54:30 PM

> "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise.

And should never be a thing. It's not for others to decide something is useless. Let the market figure that out. It should simply be an even playing field, and in theory we already have the regulatory mechanisms to get that done. If the rates are currently able to be abused, that is entirely correctable.

It should not matter if I want to build 1000MW of aluminum smelting capacity, or a facility that digs holes and fills them back in again - so long as I'm paying the regulatory rates that have been set to be fair across all similar power consumers.

The bigger problem by far is that we spent 40-60 years not building anything. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's power capacity. Can only ride inertia and offshoring your industrial energy usage for so long. There are a lot of chickens coming home to roost in the next decade or three on this topic, electric grid was just pulled forward a bit due to the AI bubble.

by phil21

3/5/2026 at 4:52:12 PM

Power prices have nearly nothing to do with proximity like that, at least in most areas. Local interconnect surcharges are a thing, but not usually material.

It's the entire region where prices will increase. A facility could be built 200 miles away from you and it would have just as much of an impact on your power bill as one built across the road.

> Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing

The issue with this requirement is that it's not a capital problem. Big tech would be happy to pay someone to build more power generation and just take a power feed, even if it costs marginally more.

What they cannot do is wait 12 years for what they could get done in 2. And I do not blame them at all for this at all - building anything in the US is basically impossible these days due to the NIMBY and general culture of not getting things done. We forgot how to rapidly build infrastructure in an efficient manner, and anyone putting proverbial boot to ass to get this done is a good thing.

It's not a case of a datacenter operator wanting to save a few pennies per kwh. It's a case of the power literally not being there and the utilities being utterly incompetent at building anything in any reasonable timeframe.

by phil21

3/5/2026 at 1:00:40 PM

Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it, and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.

by jfengel

3/5/2026 at 1:42:51 PM

A higher tax on DC with the tax revenue invested into public electrical infrastructure and public power stations. With billions powered into AI they can out-price everyone out of resources they use - be it directly (high electricity rates) or indirectly (high prices for everything which is needed to expand power networks). But it will not happen of course.

by citrin_ru

3/5/2026 at 3:05:12 PM

Build and colocate the needed rewnewable (solar/wind/battery) capacity with the data centers and make them energy efficient by eg choosing cool locations.

by fulafel

3/5/2026 at 2:21:27 PM

Yes. No data centers.

by veryemartguy

3/5/2026 at 4:05:53 AM

You can read the actual pledge at [0]. The executive order regarding it is at [1].

There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...

by miyoji

3/5/2026 at 2:06:42 PM

This sounds really cool and all governmenty

> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.

by soared

3/5/2026 at 4:34:37 AM

It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.

One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.

by AdieuToLogic

3/5/2026 at 3:28:12 PM

I'm not understanding why clarifying the legal implications is important if it's a smoke screen for everyone involved doing what they are going to do anyway. It seems more like a distraction away from the real problems.

by trinsic2

3/5/2026 at 3:24:52 PM

What is the point of reading it? Pledges mean nothing.

by trinsic2

3/5/2026 at 5:32:09 AM

It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.

We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.

This absolutely cannot backfire. /s

by dsl

3/5/2026 at 4:22:25 PM

Good. I want more power plants built, especially ones that don't emit CO2.

by terminalshort

3/5/2026 at 6:46:43 AM

What’s wrong with this?

by simianwords

3/5/2026 at 6:53:45 AM

Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.

by ipaddr

3/5/2026 at 7:41:19 AM

Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the price of power to go up?

by sparky_z

3/5/2026 at 9:31:23 AM

Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".

The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.

I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.

by myrmidon

3/5/2026 at 4:02:13 PM

I'm sure power plant building companies won't say no to more business

by PunchyHamster

3/5/2026 at 9:52:51 AM

Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.

by soulofmischief

3/5/2026 at 12:32:43 PM

Grid overload if they produce too much base load.

Interconnection expenses.

Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.

by tomrod

3/5/2026 at 12:47:25 PM

so no companies should build anything even if they attempt to pay for the externalities. this is just nimbyism.

by simianwords

3/5/2026 at 1:06:24 PM

"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.

In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.

by jfengel

3/5/2026 at 5:38:07 PM

You'll notice that I did not advocate against building and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being aware of tradeoffs.

In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right solution to a problem.

I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a follow up comment to understand your train of thought.

by tomrod

3/5/2026 at 3:32:38 AM

This is USA so we all know that those techs companies won't pay a cent back at the end, but the population will.

by h4kunamata

3/5/2026 at 4:58:05 AM

The tech companies don't really have any issue paying for the capacity, this is a negligible cost compared to the compute capital, they just want streamlined regulatory approvals to bring the plants online.

by bpodgursky

3/5/2026 at 11:45:17 AM

> The tech companies don't really have any issue paying

It reduces profit.

by NegativeK

3/5/2026 at 3:26:32 PM

Wrong, using grid power without adding capacity will result in tech companies paying more for electricity too. They want to add capacity.

by bpodgursky

3/5/2026 at 4:37:55 PM

Are you absolutely sure they don't want us to add the capacity for them with a pathway for further government subsidies?

Almost everything in tech has been subsidized in one way or another via tax avoidance schemes or outright lobbying and manipulation of the market.

Why would this be any different?

by softfalcon

3/5/2026 at 2:54:46 AM

Does it include externalities (co2 emissions)?

Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.

by fulafel

3/5/2026 at 12:30:49 PM

The current US government is systematically attacking anything which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and claims it's mostly all a scam.

So no.

But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.

Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).

by dathinab

3/5/2026 at 6:07:00 PM

Acid rain and smog are not much of a concern with gas turbines. The most problematic exhaust is probably nitrous oxide.

by adrianN

3/5/2026 at 1:29:10 PM

Look in the mirror.

No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost overrun.

And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local turbine is less worse specifically because people like you, saying the exact same things you're saying right now have saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd pay for it with all sorts of requirements.

It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go, add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look pretty good.

by cucumber3732842

3/5/2026 at 2:55:39 PM

The MBA pencil pusher would pay a billion for 1 unit of electricity if it increased their market cap by a trillion. The margin is so fat and the percieved upside so great that 9 figure signing bonuses have been thrown around.

Of course this will all change, but I doubt we will see tech companies opening power plants anytime soon with their associated balance sheet dragging 1% return on equity.

by blitzar

3/5/2026 at 5:03:47 AM

The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.

by adrianN

3/5/2026 at 11:09:29 AM

Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown.

When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

by nDRDY

3/5/2026 at 11:31:19 AM

I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.

by harimau777

3/5/2026 at 12:48:30 PM

it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details

trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition

and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues

(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)

but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap

hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead

by dathinab

3/5/2026 at 5:40:25 PM

The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.

The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries.

IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.

by mrguyorama

3/5/2026 at 1:09:44 PM

It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.

by nDRDY

3/5/2026 at 11:32:24 AM

I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.

by adrianN

3/5/2026 at 12:41:45 PM

the only crazy thing here is your comment

completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)

various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)

and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too

it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).

by dathinab

3/5/2026 at 2:57:51 PM

my read was ... we should cut down trees, burn them and bury the ashes to save the planet

by blitzar

3/5/2026 at 4:03:35 PM

It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.

by nDRDY

3/5/2026 at 5:39:29 PM

I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid thing I've ever read on the internet.

by BizarroLand

3/5/2026 at 9:31:44 AM

Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?

by erpellan

3/5/2026 at 9:48:40 AM

You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.

Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.

by AngryData

3/5/2026 at 11:08:01 AM

Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!

by nDRDY

3/5/2026 at 11:33:31 AM

Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from the atmosphere.

by adrianN

3/5/2026 at 4:12:18 AM

There are no such things as CO2 emissions in this administration. Your AI chatbots will be powered by clean coal and you'll enjoy it!

by warkdarrior

3/5/2026 at 10:41:36 AM

They have a cute mascot, so it can't be that bad: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/meet-coal...

Actually, the tweet quoted in the article is firmly in the "you can't make this $%&/ up" category...

by rob74

3/5/2026 at 9:50:31 AM

/s this guy gets it. Thank you, finally speaking my language

by cyrusradfar

3/5/2026 at 12:13:25 PM

So you believe Microsoft will start opening up coal plants again and not nuclear?

by thegreatpeter

3/5/2026 at 1:06:45 PM

Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).

It is also a ~50 year investment.

This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.

Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.

Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best working out on paper (and quite often not even there).

So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.

by dathinab

3/5/2026 at 8:05:10 AM

Sound and particulate pollution too.

by burnt-resistor

3/5/2026 at 4:23:33 AM

While we're at it, water use is another externality.

by analog31

3/5/2026 at 4:08:10 AM

Strange downvotes for a relevant question.

by deaux

3/5/2026 at 1:43:56 PM

I too pledge to bear costs of energy I use.

I was unaware it was optional.

by blitzar

3/5/2026 at 1:56:27 PM

hah yeah that's pretty funny. "you can count on us to pay our electricity bill!" - tech companies.

by chasd00

3/5/2026 at 11:03:19 AM

We should be focusing on how to build large turbines and transformers more quickly. A lot of transmission projects are blocked on equipment. There are warehouses full of photovoltaics that we cant use because of other industrial bottlenecks. We can build an entire PV plant before we can obtain a single custom transformer for a substation.

by bob1029

3/5/2026 at 11:44:51 AM

Fear not citizen! Ya boi Elon got you covered with the new Megablock.

Ta da! It's 3 Megapaks wired together with a transformer. Now that's innovation.

See? Without billionaires, who would save us from billionaires?

Tesla’s Megablock: Breaking the Transformer Bottleneck https://www.rebellionaire.com/post/tesla-megablock-transform...

by ourmandave

3/5/2026 at 3:27:18 PM

Most of these Data centers will be powered by Natural Gas, which flows from production through interstate pipelines, which already are fully subscribed meaning there isn’t any space left. As these data centers come online they will suck supply from these interstate pipelines, drastically increasing prices for all other forms of Natural gas usage (including residential power generation). This has a direct impact on prices for the end user and there is nothing that can be done in time to facilitate this from not occurring.

Building pipelines is a long and arduous process and one that will not be done in time to reasonably accommodate the increase in natural gas demand presented by these data centers.

by Aboutplants

3/5/2026 at 3:18:52 PM

None of what they're pledging is much of a change from how they've already been operating:

- They already invest in new power plants and connection infrastructure when they bring in new datacenters - Electricity for datacenters is based on capacity rather than actual usage - They already have backup generators at most datacenters that they can run during outages. It wouldn't be much work to allow those to feed power back into the grid in extraordinary circumstances - They generally use local contractors to build them for practicality purposes anyway.

This is just some fancy PR and nothing else.

by yuliyp

3/5/2026 at 2:59:37 AM

We're all gonna end up paying for this and everyone involved knows it.

by deadbolt

3/5/2026 at 10:53:34 AM

Public investment yields private dividends.

by beloch

3/5/2026 at 1:53:01 PM

“Socialize the losses, privatize the profits”.

by Xunjin

3/5/2026 at 3:07:45 PM

I covered my house in solar panels so it’s all irrelevant now.

Soon I’ll get a used EV and cover the garage in panels too so I don’t have to care about wars causing surges in gas prices either.

by testing22321

3/5/2026 at 6:33:25 PM

Mark Zuckerberg, also at the White House in 2025, as caught by a hot mic: "Sorry, I wasn't ready... I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with."

The pledge is meaningless political theater meant to placate voters in the mid-terms.

by overfeed

3/5/2026 at 11:16:21 AM

Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?

Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.

This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !

by mentalgear

3/5/2026 at 3:59:32 PM

That still doesn't necessarily mean that prices won't be impacted indirectly. Let's say Amazon (or any other AI behemoth) builds a mini-nuclear plant to feed the electricity of their data center (as has been touted). Let's say every one follows suit. That implies an increase in the demand of uranium, which means an increase in price, which means an increase in the costs of the other nuclear plants, which is translated to higher electricity costs.

One could say "use renewables", but even that has externalities: that means an increase in demand for solar panels, or wind turbines, or the labour to maintain them, which again leads to an increase in prices.

by youknownothing

3/5/2026 at 1:23:01 PM

Does a “pledge” have more or less weight than a pinky promise?

by cainxinth

3/5/2026 at 2:55:20 PM

Depends, were their fingers crossed behind their backs or not?

by ModernMech

3/5/2026 at 3:06:16 PM

We already charge different rates for residential vs industrial water usage. Why not do the same here and simply charge them more? The state could also impose a direct data center surcharge on their usage.

by koolba

3/5/2026 at 4:02:40 PM

Coz that fucks up every industry, even the ones actually useful to people.

by PunchyHamster

3/5/2026 at 5:11:22 PM

You can buy solar panels and mitigate your future costs today. Start with plug-in solar if you're curious.

by 1970-01-01

3/5/2026 at 2:47:04 AM

"The invisible hand" of free markets has become truly invisible...

by cs702

3/5/2026 at 3:03:27 AM

Non-binding and voluntary = a bunch of lip service

by mcs5280

3/5/2026 at 5:18:07 PM

Oooh, pledges; just what corporations excel at.

I'm sure we'll be hearing all about how much this benefits households in the coming months and years.

by ChoGGi

3/5/2026 at 4:50:50 PM

Microsoft is already doing it with nuclear. So is xAI/X/Tesla, the cleanest and most carbon friendly company on the planet.

by thecarbonista

3/5/2026 at 5:00:48 PM

Laughable statement

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

by bakies

3/5/2026 at 9:04:10 PM

Yeah that article is pretty laughable.

by thecarbonista

3/5/2026 at 2:59:52 PM

I don't care about pledges. Pledges mean nothing.

by pacerwpg

3/5/2026 at 12:02:53 PM

I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new powerplants are backlogged for years.

That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere reducing solar).

To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000 worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.

But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.

But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all. Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50% of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous plants.

You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.

by NoLinkToMe

3/5/2026 at 2:01:11 PM

The point of your whole argument is that “financial experts” are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the Big Tech would start talking about “energy crisis”.

In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.

by Xunjin

3/5/2026 at 10:22:31 PM

So why did Nadella not pour a few billion into buying the 50% capacity that the average coal/gas plant has spare, that they're not running due to insufficient demand?

by NoLinkToMe

3/5/2026 at 3:20:48 PM

Cool. So they’ll build and operate gas turbines (or probably contract operations to do so) and then drive demand on the natgas, as well as over burden the gas delivery networks.

by Jordanpomeroy

3/5/2026 at 12:45:40 PM

The same way Nvidia "pledged" $100B to OpenAI?

by LunaSea

3/5/2026 at 4:28:02 AM

As long as they promised. Their word is golden

by dolphinscorpion

3/5/2026 at 1:44:23 PM

I will take this as seriously as any other promise issued at the White House in this regime.

by Arubis

3/5/2026 at 3:37:16 AM

Even if the pledges are in good faith, people are being naive about how utilities work.

The general goal for utilities has been to pursue the next “thing” and work toward some sort of regulation to lock in demand, which can be used as a lever to seek price increases and consolidate.

If there’s margin to be had, the utilities will find a way, and prices will go up either way.

by 7thpower

3/5/2026 at 5:00:04 AM

Some towns in my state are already complaining about the noise from turbines supplying on-site power to a data center that's been built here. They're keeping people up at night. I'm broadly supportive of a "techie go home" movement.

by bitwize

3/5/2026 at 1:39:05 PM

>"The pledge includes a commitment"

Pledge my ass. It is either law mandating those massive datacenters absorb the cost with heavy penalties for non compliance or it is just BS talk (what it seems to be at the moment)

by FpUser

3/5/2026 at 1:41:46 PM

Like Musk just set up his own turbines regardless of what laws say

I can see how big tech is enthusiastic about freestyling this. Eh sorry I mean bear the cost

by Havoc

3/5/2026 at 12:44:46 PM

This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like municipal broadband.

Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).

The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.

So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.

[1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...

[2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-over...

by jmyeet

3/5/2026 at 11:54:11 AM

Much like the price of RAM, SSD, and GPU. The ballooning data-center energy consumption costs have already broken the middle class economic-loop Westinghouse electric drove in the 1950s. Some are seeing their utility bills double.

People are not voluntarily going to build things that make less profit.

It is a suckers bet assuming the unscrupulous will grow a conscience. =3

by Joel_Mckay

3/5/2026 at 5:12:35 PM

Bare cost? They used energy for free before?

by m3kw9

3/5/2026 at 1:38:01 PM

1y from here they will be talking how nuclear facilities are necessary

by motbus3

3/5/2026 at 11:21:29 AM

Can I pledge to pay taxes?

by nixass

3/5/2026 at 8:04:12 AM

Like trickle down economics? Fool me once ...

by burnt-resistor

3/5/2026 at 3:16:51 PM

Wait a minute, so who else was paying the bills?

by Razengan

3/5/2026 at 6:26:58 AM

I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.

Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.

by otterley

3/5/2026 at 9:02:21 AM

An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.

They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".

Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".

No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.

It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.

edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.

by ZeroGravitas

3/5/2026 at 8:43:10 AM

They are pledging to not only pay for their own bills but rather increase the supply of electricity itself. This will reduce retail electricity prices.

This mean retail consumers are paying less for electricity than what they would have paid if not for the pledge.

by simianwords

3/5/2026 at 9:20:32 AM

What if they pay own bills (why is this even a subject of discussion?), increase supply (formally), but electricity prices still go up anyway? Just curios if scenario from my descrition even possible...

by podgorniy

3/5/2026 at 9:23:14 AM

that could happen because the demand could rise even more.

by simianwords

3/5/2026 at 10:29:55 AM

oh well if they pledge it's okay then!

by throawayonthe

3/5/2026 at 10:54:04 AM

They’re pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid will supply the energy.

by mr_toad

3/5/2026 at 11:33:36 AM

Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.

by harimau777

3/5/2026 at 11:35:56 AM

move to northern virginia - the capital of data centers - and see what happens to your energy bills…

by bdangubic

3/5/2026 at 9:45:10 AM

Stealing from the people; enriching myself

by stevefan1999

3/5/2026 at 2:32:03 PM

I don't believe them. I don't trust corporations. At all. I look back at all the broken promises of corporations like AT&T, all while doing massive stock buy backs, and I simply don't want to hear their bullshit anymore.

by HumblyTossed

3/5/2026 at 3:23:47 PM

Please Democrats don't fuck up the midterms.[1] Take the house and start legislating in favor of the humans. [2]

[1] Narrator: they will [2] Narrator: they won't

by buellerbueller

3/5/2026 at 5:00:32 PM

Our whole system is a binary carrot and stick. Im not sure we are going to see much change when/if democrats return to power. IMHO politics is manufactured to keep the people placated while the people in power to continue business as usual. If you want real change there has to be some kind of movement from grassroots that ends citizens united and starts enforcing anti-trust legislation independent of party politics.

I was looking at this one organization[0], they want to do a constitutional amendment. At this point, I cant disagree with them, but with this administration, I don't know what good its going to do.

[0]: https://americanpromise.net/our-plan/

by trinsic2

3/5/2026 at 12:10:24 PM

Everything that the white house says atm, they do the opposite.

by dev1ycan

3/5/2026 at 4:39:12 PM

Terrific if it happens. I may even ignore the AI (valuation) bubble for the duration.

David Roberts (https://volts.wtf) has repeatedly noted that AI companies need the power, need it now, and have the capital to get it. So he (and others) advocate that Big Tech fund the grid improvements and new power generation.

Point #1 Virtual Power Plants

Roberts advocates adopting virtual power plants (VPPs). Think grid of grids, like the internet is a network of networks. Think peer-to-peer energy sharing. VPPs unlock dynamic load shifting, two-way energy sharing (think of all those roof top solar panels and powerwalls), and therefore -- most importantly -- reduces peak demand on a grid which will allow greater utilitization.

IIRC: our grids currently operate at 30% capacity (to accommodate rare peak demand events). Grid enhancement techs plus VPPs can boost that to 80% or higher. Reducing the urgency for building more transmission and distribution infra. (In the short term; we still need to greatly embiggen our grid(s).)

It'd be kinda amazing if the urgency to build more data centers mooted the incumbent's (utilities, regulators) opposition to improving our grid(s), thereby benefiting everyone everywhere.

Tangent: there's a backlog of grid enhancing technologies available, just waiting for funding and incentives to line up.

Tangent: VPPs also enable new financial products, which will further accelerate electrification (of All The Things).

Point #2 Solar + Battery

Solar + battery is the fastest, cheapest way to get new power generation. More so every year.

Yes, we still need to massively invest in All The Things to reach Net Zero and beyond. Wind, geothermal, nuclear (fission and fusion), hydro, every flavor of storage, de-carbonize industry and agriculture, conservation, rewilding, and everything else.

But at this moment in time, today, we need gigawatts of new generation and the grid that can support it. That means solar + battery.

Aside, IIRC, data centers are projected to demand just 5% our electricity supply. So society will be the net beneficiaries (on this axis).

Were Big Tech to fund the generation and grid that we need, maybe society will indulge some of Big Tech's less egregious offenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence

Important Point: the rising costs of transmission, distribution, and fuel costs account for electricity's higher prices. New renewable power generation is now the cheapest option, and getting cheaper. The challenge is delivering that cheap electricity to customers.

by specialist

3/5/2026 at 3:36:50 AM

The only people who believes corpo jackoffery these days are either boomers or people investing their remaining money in big line go up

by powerpcmac

3/5/2026 at 10:27:59 AM

I've read so many of these pledges before.... tl'dr: no, they won't

by campuscodi

3/5/2026 at 3:12:36 AM

Do they pledge the costs of noise pollution and damage to water sources? Let’s be honest - these pledges are theater that reflects an agreement between tech oligarchs and the Trump administration. The pay the bribes via donations or whatever, and get back this deceptive theater show.

by SilverElfin

3/5/2026 at 2:38:19 AM

[dead]

by pcdoodle

3/5/2026 at 3:09:46 AM

[dead]

by Drunkfoowl

3/5/2026 at 2:13:58 AM

[flagged]

by techblueberry

3/5/2026 at 2:33:33 AM

Using Claude to provide a legal definition of "pledge" is unconvincing at best.

> What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?

To answer that question is to first agree upon the legal definition of "pledge":

  pledge
  
  v. to deposit personal property as security for a personal 
  loan of money. If the loan is not repaid when due, the 
  personal property pledged shall be forfeit to the lender. 
  The property is known as collateral. To pledge is the same 
  as to pawn. 2) to promise to do something.[0]

Without careful review of the document signed, it is impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable in this case.

> A pledge is a public commitment or statement of intent, not a binding legal contract.

This very well may be incorrect in this context and serves an exemplar as to why relying upon statistical document generation is not a recommended legal strategy.

0 - https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1544

by AdieuToLogic

3/5/2026 at 2:39:29 AM

Wait, we know it’s not your definition, because it’s inapplicable.

by techblueberry

3/5/2026 at 3:06:18 AM

> Wait, we know it’s not your definition ...

Of course it is not "my definition", as I cited the source of it.

> ... because it’s inapplicable.

Take that up with law.com.

by AdieuToLogic

3/5/2026 at 3:30:01 AM

Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude. I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?

Law.com's first definition is inapplicable. That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.

by staticman2

3/5/2026 at 4:02:15 AM

> Your goal seemed to be to fact check Claude.

No, this is not my goal. My goal was to illuminate that Claude is a product which produces the most statistically relevant content to a prompt submitted therein.

> I'm not sure why your failure to do so should be taken up with law.com?

The post to which I originally replied cited "Claude" as if it were an authoritative source. To which I disagreed and then provided a definition from law.com. Where is my failure?

> Law.com's first definition is inapplicable.

From the article:

  The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to 
  bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, 
  either from new power plants or existing plants with 
  expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from 
  big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and 
  to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities.[0]

> That leaves us with the second definition, which says nothing about whether a pledge is legally binding.

To which I originally wrote:

  Without careful review of the document signed, it is 
  impossible to verify which form of the above is applicable 
  in this case.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/04/us-tech-comp...

by AdieuToLogic

3/5/2026 at 11:14:05 AM

This is exhausting. Claude read the article.

Said article is not about a loan backed by a security agreement. That eliminates law.com definition 1.

Law.com definition 2 is silent on whether pledges are binding.

Thus ended your research.

I don't know why you care if Claude.com is authoritative. Law.com isn't either, the authoritative legal references are paywalled. A law dictionary, as we've demonstrated by law.com's second definition's vagueness, isn't necessarily even the correct reference to consult.

Your failure, I suppose, is that you provided worse information than Claude. I suppose you should have typed "Don't cite Claude please" and moved on.

by staticman2

3/5/2026 at 11:01:34 AM

> For a personal loan of money

The seven are doing some fancy accounting to pay for their data centers, but I don’t think Larry, Sergey and others are taking out personal loans.

by mr_toad

3/5/2026 at 3:00:19 AM

Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response. Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.

by retrochameleon

3/5/2026 at 3:13:16 AM

> Your answer is less useful and thought out than the Claude response.

"Less useful" is subjective and I shall not contend. "Less thought out" is laughable as I possess the ability to think and "Claude" does not.

> Claude actually answers the question in the context in which it's being asked.

The LLM-based service generated a statistically relevant document to the prompt given in which you, presumably a human, interpreted said document as being "actually answers the question". This is otherwise known as anthropomorphism[0].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism

by AdieuToLogic

3/5/2026 at 4:09:58 AM

The AI slop is still slop in any context.

by behringer

3/5/2026 at 3:30:27 AM

Is it the same kind of pledge as alluded to in the Amber Heard trial?

by xeonmc

3/5/2026 at 3:13:33 AM

Pledges are somewhere between a pinky swear and a high five.

by mattas

3/5/2026 at 4:10:48 AM

Fingers crossed spit shake

by washadjeffmad

3/5/2026 at 2:28:52 AM

It's a PR exercise that makes both the companies and the administration feel good. Not more. There will be no or just cosmetic change.

by vjvjvjvjghv

3/5/2026 at 3:51:24 AM

You can just use a traditional search engine for this. I have no interest in reading your LLM output.

by lurk2

3/5/2026 at 2:27:21 AM

considering how we uphold treaties im not sure the terminology matters one way or the other

by thejazzman

3/5/2026 at 3:27:57 AM

Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken. It's certainly possible, we don't need to be cynical.

by drak0n1c

3/5/2026 at 4:04:07 AM

The thing about the old days is, they’s the old days.

And yes this particular group of professional liars provide every reason to be cynical.

by techblueberry

3/5/2026 at 3:49:19 AM

> Most forms of company civic greatness in the past were essentially pledges, much of the time unspoken.

You're looking at the the conditional the wrong way. You want to look at how often pledges lead to "company civic greatness" (or even, you know, anything net positive) to start guessing at the value of a given pledge.

by magicalist

3/5/2026 at 3:58:56 AM

> Wait a “pledge”? What are the legal protections of a “pledge”?

That's the boring part until you look at what they're promising to do.

It's not as if existing data centers were getting power by sending a masked rogue to climb the utility pole, tap the lines and bypass the electric meter. Paying for electricity is the thing they were going to do anyway.

Likewise, paying for "new generation capacity" is the thing they were probably going to do regardless, because colocating large data centers with power plants saves the expense of power transmission which lowers their costs.

And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase. They temporarily cause demand to exceed supply until supply has time to catch up. So on the one hand the whole issue is kind of meh because it was only ever going to be a temporary price increase anyway, and on the other hand having them build power plants at the same rate anybody else is building power plants doesn't actually change anything or address the temporary shortfall. (If you really want to solve it, find a way to build power generation capacity faster.)

And then it doesn't matter if you can enforce the promise because they're just promising to do things they were going to do anyway.

by AnthonyMouse

3/5/2026 at 11:07:09 AM

> And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase.

Musk is bringing turbines in on trailers. They’re not even bothering with permits. This is getting really wild west.

https://electrek.co/2026/03/03/elon-musk-xai-data-center-und...

by mr_toad

3/5/2026 at 2:56:53 AM

I'd be cautious about using Claude, given that they're designated as a supply chain risk by the US Government. Why not use the approved and officially certified ChatGPT instead?

by Freedom2

3/5/2026 at 3:07:04 AM

I'm assuming there's a missing /s tag there.

by XorNot

3/5/2026 at 2:34:43 AM

I don't think there's any mechanism in US law for anyone to make a binding promise about terms they plan to include in contracts they might sign with unspecified local governments in the future.

Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.

by SpicyLemonZest

3/5/2026 at 2:47:13 AM

| Congress could pass a new law requiring it, of course, but I think we all understand that this would not accomplish the administration's real goal of letting Trump prove he's the specialest boy and everyone has to give him what he wants.

... plus it would require "tech firms" to actually modify their behaviour and that would never do.

by glaucon

3/5/2026 at 4:23:13 AM

Trump helping tech bros sell more data centers. A pledge is moronic. You pay for what you use since time immemorial. Don't need to redefine existing words with new meaning.

by madhacker

3/5/2026 at 2:33:45 PM

The way to enforce this would be to provide US citizens with free electric and charge companies only.

That will never happen, but would prevent we the people from bearing these costs directly.

by imchillyb

3/5/2026 at 4:03:24 PM

It would just make other industries subsidize AI datacenters

by PunchyHamster

3/5/2026 at 9:56:24 AM

It feels like ordinary people are becoming increasingly unnecessary. With AI, data centers, and big corporations, they don’t really need ordinary people anymore apart from their own employees. Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them, and ordinary people could just be put in zoos for display.

by yanhangyhy

3/5/2026 at 9:57:49 AM

>Capitalists only need robots and artificial intelligence to serve them

That doesn't make sense because robots and AI won't have money to buy goods and services.

by DeathArrow

3/5/2026 at 10:38:39 AM

True but they will focus their market on the every enriching 0.1% that will have all the money.

by wolvoleo

3/5/2026 at 10:54:45 AM

People have already hooked up Stripe accounts to OpenClaw instances, so AI's currently buying and selling goods and services.

by fragmede

3/5/2026 at 10:53:57 AM

The capitalists realized that if they literally starve the working class there will be revolution. But if they produce enough so they can sustain (barely) rest of the people with 1% output while they consume 99%, it will be okay.

So don't worry, you'll have basic ~~income~~ soylent green.

by KptMarchewa

3/5/2026 at 5:49:21 PM

Capitalists don't care about money. Capitalists collect money for it's power in a capitalist system.

If they get "AI" and industrial robots, they don't care that nobody can buy their products anymore because they never cared about selling products in the first place.

Right now capitalists loathe that they can "only* collect a 10-50% return on the things "they build", and the rest of the value has to go to the consumer. They want nothing more than getting rid of that "waste", and just having their personal factories create whatever they want and their personal farms making whatever they want and we all just fucking die.

by mrguyorama