alt.hn

5/23/2026 at 7:42:10 PM

Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity–and the Backlash Has Begun

 https://singularityhub.com/2026/05/22/data-centers-now-consume-6-of-electricity-in-the-us-and-the-backlash-has-begun/

by cdrnsf

5/23/2026 at 10:29:09 PM

This is the part that really stood out to me.

> It’s not only new projects putting strain on the grid though. The report found that an estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work.

Containerized sandbox environments for AI can be incredibly wasteful. If those sandboxes are kept available so the user gets sub-second access that is a continual user of RAM, and thus overall computing resources. We built the first version of https://www.aha.io/builder/overview using a typical containerized environment - just like you see with products like Replit - but were appalled at the inefficiency and waste. We rebuilt it from the ground-up to use shared architecture instead with Javascript-level isolation, and almost zero waste. Using shared computing instead of containers means instant startup time, and (almost) zero resource consumption when not active. You still consume disk to store the artifacts, but there is no ongoing RAM or CPU.

I think a reckoning is coming for container-based AI systems too. We are seeing tokens trend towards reflecting the actual cost, and I think the same will be true of containerized runtime environments too.

by k1w1

5/24/2026 at 1:29:51 PM

I just discovered that a bunch of repos that I forked on github are running all sorts of Actions daily, to the tune of $200/month.I don't get charged for it because they're public repos. But its evidently doing a bunch of zombie compute, and is happening across everyone's forks... Maybe it's partly why github is shit now.

by nchmy

5/23/2026 at 11:49:26 PM

We need reliable and ubiquitous checkpointing, then it won't matter if your workload executes in a container runtime or in a WASM sandbox or even on bare metal.

by tadfisher

5/24/2026 at 10:40:32 AM

During the dot com boom they said data centers consumed 8% of US electricity. It was later proven to be a lie, created with fake studies by coal companies to trick the US into building more coal power plants using environmental activist outrage to implant the idea that the internet needs coal into the mainstream. Make of that what you will

by mhjkl

5/24/2026 at 3:51:27 PM

Even assuming this was true at all, something happening 30 years ago is not evidence that the exact same thing is happening today.

by hoytschermerhrn

5/24/2026 at 3:34:00 PM

> It was later proven to be a lie

Source?

by JumpCrisscross

5/24/2026 at 12:46:43 PM

China might not win on GPU or Software Stack, but they will definitely win on the lower end of the stack which is Datacenters and Electricity Grid infrastructure building out. And I wouldn't be surprised they are 10x the rate of US.

by ksec

5/24/2026 at 2:45:41 PM

Well yes but they don't have to worry about environmental or social concerns. They can just pollute wherever they want and jail anyone who complains.

Economically it might be more successful but I'd prefer being a citizen somewhere else.

by wolvoleo

5/24/2026 at 2:49:00 PM

> They can just pollute wherever they want and jail anyone who complains.

Hey don’t worry, the US is catching up: https://www.fox4news.com/news/woman-arrested-facebook-post-c...

I suspect the drug addicted pedophile SV elite will start endorsing other Chinese social ideas so that we “don’t fall behind”.

by blowscum

5/24/2026 at 3:55:50 PM

Putting the human freedom issues aside, I don't see how Datacenter and Electricity production have much environmental or social concerns especially when they are built in mostly remote places. This isn't some manufacturing facility that leaks toxic substances into river. And China's annual solar installation rate is more than the rest of the world combined.

>Economically it might be more successful

Economics is what gives you power. US needs to wake up and start taking it seriously rather than feeling good about themselves being the best country in the world.

by ksec

5/24/2026 at 6:53:29 PM

> US needs to wake up and start taking it seriously rather than feeling good about themselves being the best country in the world.

If they consider themselves the best country in the world they need to wake up anyway :) :) :)

Honestly, my boss approached me last year reminding me there was this company program about sponsorship for moving to the US (it is how he got there too) and I really had to make an effort not to laugh. Sure they will pay 3x as much as where I live but really, no. I'm very progressive, socialist, pro-LGBT etc. I would hate it there. I won't even fly there to visit at this point.

I would consider China for tourism much more at this point. They have this cyberpunk city I'd love to see. But thanks to Trump flying across the middle east is heavily disrupted so not this year.

by wolvoleo

5/24/2026 at 4:07:41 PM

Theres this weird false dichotomy people do in energy discussions where they imply that you can either be an authoritarian regime with no property rights and build power plants, or have a rule of law and not build any energy infrastructure at all.

Don’t get it twisted. Their superpower is that they actually just build solar panels, wind turbines, and nuke plants. The answer to should we build, is “yes.”

BTW, look at what is happening today, under this administration, at the US EPA sometime.

by mlsu

5/24/2026 at 3:04:08 PM

..china? what

by throawayonthe

5/24/2026 at 7:53:59 AM

I do think token demand might actually become satiated at some point. Machine to machine scenarios imply the potential for infinite sprawl, but machines don't run for free or forever. There is always a human with interest involved somewhere. You can try to hand wave the human away, but at some point you would be forced to reveal who is paying for the electricity, computers, real estate and internet connectivity.

by bob1029

5/24/2026 at 11:24:16 AM

Sure, but presuming next generation AI is nearly as high utility as a good as a junior engineer, a team of 1-3 seniors could be running projects with 10-30 junior engineers as is. Then consider that much of the throttle on adding more is cost per engineer matching cost of living oriented salary and demotivation effects of giving engineers projects that don't ship and don't further their career path.

I could easily see the equivalent of tens of thousands of engineers being used for companies that had dozens today, making prototypes of every imaginable solution to every RFE in case they are needed by management.

Cost will naturally serve as a limiter but I think most companies will find it hard to compete in their field with anyone who keeps costs similar to today by replacing salaries with energy and hardware capital and continues that cost level by turning all efficiency gains into new build out.

by snazypaparazzi

5/23/2026 at 8:29:34 PM

The Coming ‘Power Wars’ Between Humans and Datacenters

https://sourceryintel.com/reports/humans-vs-datacenters

by freakynit

5/23/2026 at 9:59:53 PM

Seems the humans love the AI chatbots though. But I guess they figure they run on magic, not actual electricity and water.

by 1over137

5/24/2026 at 4:24:06 AM

context matters. chatbots on sites? companies are wasting money. great way to lose customers. we ripped ours out, i warehouse the data and we had people canceling accounts literally because support agents weren't humans. 99.9% of convos were basically the equivalent to "fuck off clanker let me talk to a real human". for context we have millions of customers in NA, retail company. chat bots are a great way to piss people off is what we learned (i mean most of us called that out at the beginning but the leadership pushed it thru the pipeline anyways). felt very vindicated after we showed them the numbers of how much people hated these things.

latest trend im seeing is the only people touting how great their agent is is people who made their agent. no one is interested in using someone elses agent. very funny social friction we've got growing.

claude/gpt/whatever? yea. sure, i guess but that's a pretty bad faith way of talking about what people love. its just the only mode of taking advantage of this shit, so i guess you could say they like "chatbots" but they are llms so that's exactly how you're supposed to interface with them. so not really meaningful to say "people love chatbots" when it's more likely people like being lazy and having stuff done for them.

im reminded of mark zuckerberg, who thinks that people want to socially network with fake not-real AI profiles. there isn't a soul in the world except mark who thinks this is a cool idea. mark is the goat of having the worst vision ever.

by trueno

5/24/2026 at 6:37:26 AM

Generally agree to your points, but, these things vary from person to person, and context to context.

1. chatbots on sites: I personally hate them too. But, instead of having no one to reply to, having even a 50% functioning bot is still good. It doesnt leave you with no answers. I have personally befitted a lot from these especially on tech sites when my questions were related to their documentations or integrations.

2. 100% agree. So many agents are there. I use none of them. But, I do use a lot of these.. all hand-crafted, and they work pretty great.

3. Talikng to chatbots: People have befitted form these, psychologically, as well as un-alived themselves. Similar to knives analogy. Both sets exist. I personally have mostly benefited.

4. Socialize wth fake not-real AI profiles: Again varies from person to person and the situation they are in. They are genuinely fun to chat with once you give them some character. For example, in my case, I once gave them a character(for roleplaying) of a regular no-shit-giving-attitude guy from a hood, and chatted with them in proper hood language (I dont know what the proper word is for this language). IT was real fun. At the same time, these tools are no replacement for actually talking to a human. At least not yet.

by freakynit

5/23/2026 at 10:03:12 PM

Some humans do.

by amanaplanacanal

5/24/2026 at 1:49:04 PM

Just as well SpaceX can put them in space instead. Maybe.

by tim333

5/24/2026 at 12:51:07 AM

inb4 "why would you want to hinder progress" types.

seriously its not hard calculus to understand that we were barely scaling energy needs for people, if you're in the US you got a hostile asf admin thats calling everything woke and cancelling the possibilities that we could scale this in a way thats good for the damn planet. so to have datacenters come in and feel entitled to the same utilities that deprioritizes actual living breathing people .... like there is no "progress" argument to be made here. that is the opposite of progress. that is a damn regression.

if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves. since these things are being bankrolled from billionaire entities and idiots, they should have no problem scheduling the mar a lago dinners with the million dollar checks to get this mob of an admin to allow them to do it using "woke" energy infra. we can still live without AI, so you're not a utility yet stop pretending you are one.

same shit as the bitcoin nonsense from 14-17, all the dorkus maximus types claimed that bitcoin mining would force energy to scale and everyone would collectively benefit from greener energy sources. total fever dreams touted by people chasing greed. all of that is a pipe dream, not happening with the powers that be in control and everyone knows it.

by trueno

5/24/2026 at 3:18:31 AM

[flagged]

by casey2

5/24/2026 at 4:02:30 AM

> degrowthers

lmao im wheezing, AI lovers have definitely reached cryptocurrency-adjacent levels of lmao out here

by trueno

5/24/2026 at 3:38:07 AM

If you think the parent is being unreasonable, just wait until you see how the general public gets after another couple of years of this.

Your use of the word “degrowther” outs you as a neoliberal shill. And oh look at that. You have <100 karma.

by therobots927

5/23/2026 at 11:45:39 PM

The backlash is and always has been incredibly fucking stupid. The same dipshits who want to bring manufacturing back to the US cannot tolerate goddamned data centers when the negative externalities and infastructural strain would be orders of magnitude worse.

by Nasrudith

5/24/2026 at 1:55:16 AM

If the data centers paid for their own negative externalities instead of foisting them off on the local people, the local people wouldn't be so pissed off.

Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.

Sucking gigawatts from the grid and making the rest of the people pay for the necessary upgrades is not a way to make friends.

Putting up scores of loud and polluting diesel or methane generators running 24/7/365 for main power, not just backup, without mitigating the noise and pollution, so a mile away it is 70dB on someone's front porch day and night, will really piss people off.

If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.

And it is not like the companies putting up the data centers do not have the money to do it right. They just lack the attitude to consider their effect on others.

If a new rich neighbor decided to park their semi-truck on your lawn idling all night, or pipe their sewage through your apartment water intake, you wouldn't be happy about those negative externalities either. The only "incredibly fucking stupid" thing I see here is the attitude in the post to which I'm replying.

by toss1

5/24/2026 at 4:19:29 PM

You're repeating a false story.

by inemesitaffia

5/24/2026 at 2:24:09 AM

Most of the concerns are massively overblown. For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid. With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water, so that it doesn't have any continual draw on the local water supply. And even the legacy data center water cooling systems that draws on local water supply consumes less than 3% of what U.S. gulf courses consume. Every industry uses water. This idea that this industry is especially bad as a consequence of that is simply ignorant.

>If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.

I'm skeptical that this would have any impact at all. Considering how much less data centers pollute than other industries, relative to the economic value they generate, and the disproportionate amount of hostility they receive, I don't see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement. Most of those complaining about data centers don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations, meaning that this is just a pretense for their opposition, not the motivation for it.

by ETH_start

5/24/2026 at 2:52:46 PM

>>For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid.

I see no national regulation of actual usage (the proposed Hawley-Warren act would require only reporting. And even if some national legislation/regulation did materialize, off-grid power generation is a trend because of insufficient grid supply and throughput, and regulating grid usage does NOT solve the problems of off-grid power gen, which right now typically involves massive diesel or NatGas generators which are the actual source of massive noise and air pollution.

>>With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water

Yes closed-loop water cooling is obviously better and it is good to see that trend. That does NOT solve the problem of massive water usage required for 5+ years of construction, e.g., in this town [0]

>>relative to the economic value they generate Right now, that economic value is massively negative [1], possibly the greatest bonfire of money in human history. It MAY generate positive return, but just as with mini-/personal computers and the internet, end up being just the table stakes to run a business.

>>see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement Start with the entirely plausible likely results of damaging society as social media has done — the exact mechanisms couldn't be predicted at the time, but certainly resulted in harm. AI is even more massively unpredictable, and in an already unstable society, there is little reason to not worry. I say that as a frequent and avid AI user who does find value in it. I absolutely cannot say fears are unfounded.

>>don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations Those regulations are 1) at best, nascent, 2) are definitely incomplete, and 3) do not address the problems of bringing your own power, which is exactly what has trashed neighborhoods around data centers bringing their own power [2]; i.e., BYOP is part of the problem against which people are protesting. That is totally legitimate protest reasons; go read about it instead of pontificating from ignorance and false hypotheticals.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/data-center-used...

[1] https://isaiprofitable.com/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

by toss1

5/24/2026 at 5:13:13 PM

Most of these critisms would apply to ANY major industrial build out.

You can't bemoan America becoming an import nation that doesn't produce valuable goods/services that the world wants, and then sabotage every industrial build out that can fix that problem.

As for value, I was only talking about the product — in the GDP sense — that a data center outputs.

While bubble industries can lead to companies running loss leaders, the realities of the AI industry show enormous underlying supply side and demand side development.

The cost per token has declined at an exponential rate while LLM performance has skyrocketed. AI is also the fastest adopted good or service in human history. That is the most objective judge of whether it adds value to people's lives.

As for the risks, yes any new industry introduces new risks and so the temptation is to clamp down. But taking fewer visible risks can increase your total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.

by ETH_start

5/24/2026 at 5:35:08 PM

>>sabotage every industrial build out

Very few people are actually sabotaging industrial buildout (there are a few who want to end that, but most do not); they are only insisting that what CAN be done to mitigate the ill effects IS done.

And this happens even in totalitarian China when pollution gets bad.

It isn't that hard, and it doesn't even cost that much overall, but it doesn't make the MBA bean-counters happy because it doesn't optimize for their criteria - dumping every cost possible on someone else.

* Pay for upgrades needed for the roads on which you quadruple the tonnage/day * Pay for the upgrades to the grid you need to triple the power delivery to your site * If you are going to do on-site generation, use the technology to contain or scrub your pollution and silence the noise * Don't build on endangered species' habitats

Most of all, be public, don't try to make deals with officials behind people's backs. If you actually have a societal benefit to sell that outweighs the risks and burdens, sell it, and get people behind you.

But making deals and building in secret makes it obvious that YOU have no confidence in your ability to convince anyone of the benefits to anyone but you. No wonder people push back.

>>only talking about the product — in the GDP sense — that a data center output

Although I get value for my $20 Claude subscription, I'm really getting only value that VCs are putting money in my pocket. Until token costs decline far further and actual profit is produced, here's the real situation:

Two economists are walking in a forest and they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

by toss1

5/24/2026 at 5:13:27 AM

> Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.

Huh? What's this one? Which data centre sucks 30% of water?

by simianwords

5/24/2026 at 2:38:32 PM

This one

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/data-center-used...

Not only that, while the closed-loop water-cooling systems are indeed a good idea, they do NOT solve the problem of water consumption during the years of construction, which is exactly the problem in this instance to which I was referring.

by toss1

5/24/2026 at 3:53:43 PM

Where did you get the 30% figure? I think this was a mistake - it was 30 million gallons which is <1% of the county's water usage.

by simianwords

5/24/2026 at 5:20:52 PM

It may well have been an error, good catch. In any case, whatever the amount, it was a large enough quantity pulled — unpaid — to cause the pressure in the entire system to drop, and drop enough that everyone noticed, complained, and set off the protests.

And, this is NOT the data center cooling usage, this is during construction, which is expected to last ~5 years.

by toss1

5/24/2026 at 6:57:24 PM

The water pressure was also not because of the datacenter but something else totally

> The original county letter also referenced complaints from residents near the Annelise Park subdivision about low water pressure.

> Rapson said Fayette County Water System later installed monitoring equipment in the area to track pressure levels following the complaints.

> “Since we’ve been reading it, there’s been no issue,” Tinsley said.

https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-...

Would urge everyone to be careful and not fall into trap of believing everything at face value.

by simianwords

5/24/2026 at 1:53:46 AM

> The same dipshits

Are they? "Bring manufacturing back to the US" is vaguely right-aligned and ideological AI opposition is vaguely left-aligned in my experience.

by andrewflnr

5/24/2026 at 1:10:05 AM

can’t wait for people to complain about how much water or energy bringing manufacturing back to america uses. oh wait, they won’t, cause it’s not AI. people didn’t care about data centres before AI. this is an ideological issue wrapped up with a bow on it by environmental issues. that’s not to say america is absolutely handling it’s energy transition terribly, it is

by cybercatgurrl