Your language is ambiguous — your horror is in reference to natural gas turbine generators (used at these installations) and not gasoline generators (like in a home context)?
Why the horror? I'd prefer the gas remain in the ground, but given the gassy production of US shale oil, I guess I'd rather it be used for this than just flared. I am frustrated that pollutant emissions aren't being policed, and also that the sudden turbine demand plus supply chain issues mean using aeroderivative turbines that are quite a bit less efficient than more complex combined cycle turbines.
There is currently 2x us electricity production in solar and batteries stuck in permit hell due to the US requiring they pay for grid upgrades before connection in a first in first out line that has grown in length and costs.
We could have cheap and available renewables, but we instead destroy them in bureaucratic hell that nobody cares about.
> I guess I'd rather it be used for this than just flared
I doubt this is really reducing the rates of flaring and leaky wells. Its just additional demand.
The biggest problem I've seen is they tend to build these somewhat close to residential areas with generation on-site. Often these power generation centers aren't right next to residential areas due to both air and noise pollution. But governments are often seeming to turn a blind eye.
Yes, the noise pollution is insane. Benn Jordan's YT video "Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons" is an insightful, scary 30 min video covering the datacenter infrasound noise, and the nasty things infrasound does to people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
The reason is because permitting and building a natgas generator is the easiest among the energy production methods in the US. Datacenters need to be close-ish to Internet Exchanges to be cost competitive when lighting up network capacity. Solar cells are expensive (Chinese tariffs or domestic production) and permitting is tough. Nuclear is still a permitting and cost nightmare. Wind requires a lot of land. Hydroelectric is considered an environmental dead end after the ecological effects of the Hoover Dam. Geothermal is still unproven. Transmission lines moving power between generation and consumption is a permitting nightmare.
In that world, natural gas just makes the most sense. The US hasn't build generation capacity in any meaningful way in decades. We've deindustrialized over time so it's been relatively okay, until a new form of industry (datacenters) starts putting pressure on the whole thing.
It might be a little more expensive for them, but it's cheaper when you factor in the costs of pollution which they aren't paying for and which they're forcing us to pay for through increased diseases and global warming.
How about being transparent when we ask the residents what they want. If this hypothetical scenario you fear comes to fruition, maybe instead of back door deals/misinformation/straight up lying for hype, we publicly ask the people who have to suffer the consequences of our political desires.
It's not supposed to be permanent, but it also allows them to not waste time waiting on physical locations to be built. Given how highly competitive this all is, I'm not surprised at all.
Meta's first five buildings took between two and three years to build, but Williams is almost done building out 200 MW (additional) off-grid power plants in a year, and to match that they're putting their equipment in tents. That raises questions for me:
* Did they expect the next five buildings to also take between two and three years to build if done in the same manner? I'd hope it'd be significantly faster the second time because they've perfected the design, found good local contractors and suppliers, etc.
* How much of the time was the actual structure vs. all the stuff inside they still have to do with the tents?
* How long are they expecting to keep this? Are they anticipating extra problems like leaking roofs?
* What are the "off-grid power plants"? Is this basically a whole bunch of diesel or natural gas generators? [edit: oh, yes, "The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines". I wonder if they're trucking in the fuel too.] If so, yuck.
I would guess the real problem is contractors are bottle-necked in good times, but not stupid enough to expand - knowing that bad times will come and they have to pay for all the expansion. (humans can be laid off, but you still need to make the payment on the bulldozer)
That makes sense. Although I have to pick on your example a bit: wouldn't they still need a concrete foundation for all that weight and thus still need bulldozers? Still unsure how much of the work they're actually avoiding.
The whole thing is like a video game: your construction and power are your limiting factors. We need to CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS and so on. It's interesting that this is such a limiter on the ground that SpaceX is pursuing AI satellites in space. Truly an incredible time to be alive.
> this is such a limiter on the ground that SpaceX is pursuing AI satellites in space
What is your source for this claim? It sounds like conjecture to me.
Neither power nor construction is easier in space than it is on Earth. Higher power means higher heat dissipation, which means higher-cost satellites or downsized AI hardware. Construction is monumentally more expensive when you have to ship GPUs and their associated infrastructure away from the planet where they're manufactured.
SpaceX's orbital compute will not compete against any ground-based AI capacity. It will most likely be used for edge processing of Starlink sensor data, either as an SAR solution, multiband jamming apparatus, or any other SDR applications used at the orbital scale. There is no other justification that I am aware of that necessitates space-based AI inference. The commercial space-based AI line is a glaringly obvious coverup.
Elon has mentioned this in interviews and the S-2 for SpaceX calls out permitting challenges as a reason for moving to space. Elon being Elon, I don't really believe him but this is what he claims at least.
WoW. I was thinking about building a new home recently, but now I'm thinking about pitching a membrane-tensioned tax haven, cuz last time I checked, temporary structures are exempt. This is like the ultimate real estate hack.
So AI infrastructure buildout is starting to feel a lot like emergency industrial mobilization...
Also, building rapid temp shells plus nearby gas turbines paints a very different picture than the one conveyed by the "clean-energy" PR around hyperscale data centers.
The real sickness is the years spent chasing stock buybacks and low taxes while infrastructure and industrial capacity languished. What an absurd situation where arrays of "temporary" on-site gas turbines are the only viable way to build new infrastructure like this.
Microsoft had a neat trick here in the Netherlands: instead of opening a new site they decided to make a their existing site higher by adding a few floors.
Ofcourse that only works once the Dutch borg adapts!
These datacenters have been under construction since at least June of 2025. You can see 1 building was already up in 2025 and the land was just farmland back in 9/13/2024. So this construction has been over 1 year in the making. Does this mean its construction slop? For reference colossus xAI datacenter was up and running in less than 7 months. I couldn't tell you at what capacity but this doesn't seem like quite the same story.
Edit
For a little more context
xAI colossus 2 looks to be an empty warehouse on 3/10/2025.
By 12/2025 they had already either filled the warehouse or they couldn't use the space because they appear to built multiple structures outside for the datacenter.
For comparison again meta already had that datacenter there for a number of years and then over 2 years added those structures. In 9 months it appears Tesla built a datacenter into an existing building and added structures.
As always, there are some very erudite comments here on HN, which is why I like the site so much. My erudite comment, or rather question, is this: why aren't these people using AI to solve all these problems? Surely it would be a good test of The Product and maybe it would give s[ck]eptics some food for thought?
Why not ask someone that can do astrology to do your stock picks and sports bets for you?
You know and I know that The Product is at best nowt more than 'astrology'. The Product does do search engine things though, and it could be scaled down to fit in a phone or even a watch, to be good enough for 'the pub quiz' or for writing a gormless email.
As for the article, META does very little for the vastness of the corporation. They have gazillions of developers yet Facebook and Instagram are as boring as ever, Threads and the Metaverse are just lame and what else do they do, apart from serve ads?
Microsoft had trialed datacenters in tents nearly 20 years ago. I remember hearing about their trials at some talks back in the day. Crazy to look back on the dates here, felt like it wasn't that long ago.
revealed preference theory is typically applied to individuals or single decision-making units like a household, rather than worldwide aggregate market behavior.
in any case, its not really that complicated in this case.
- the ai companies have a billion active users and billions of dollars in revenue.
- a poll comes back with 30% of respondents saying they are angry about ai.
so, why do the ai companies keep doing ai things despite ~30% of people not liking ai? well, its because they are making billions of dollars in revenue from their billion users. from the ai company's perspective, it would be madness not to keep shoving ai everywhere.
I don't hate the data centers near me. However I do hate the tax incentives they were given. My local school district could really use those millions of dollars per year that someone decided we don't get.
But a billion active users != number of US citizens that take on the burden of AI. So go build your AI on land where your customers are if they like it so much.
Yeah in the states where the majority of people approve. But we already know the data centers aren’t being built in those areas. They’re being enforced on people who for the most part dont approve of their intent.
If a large proportion of people are only using AI because they are being threatened with unemployment if they don't, then there's going to be massive resentment building up
You may think that doesn't matter, but it does. History has shown over and over that you can only keep a lid on massive social resentment for so long before things break
this does not matter from the business perspective.
microsoft does not care that your company forces you to use their products. google does not care that your school forces you to use their products. TSMC does not care that you are forced to use their products when purchasing ~any electronics. etc.
I think good governance would listen to polls over metrics.
A good example of how this works is cocaine.
Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.
>I think good governance would listen to polls over metrics.
hypothetically, you own a widget company. you sell a lot of widgets. every month, you are selling even more widgets. the widgets are flying off the shelves. you keep ramping up production, and the consumers keep on buying.
gallup releases a poll that says "people hate widgets".
>why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?
for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics
The public hates ai but also uses ai in mass quantities.
Capitalism abides by your dollars not your voice.
So people can decry ai all they want but if they keep using it, it won't go away.
Even then it's probable that AI is a big enough productivity boost for certain industries that even if no consumers used AI, businesses would still prop AI up enough for it to live on.
Nah, dollars buy war machines. And for the first time in human history, we are on the precipice of projecting substantial ground force without the need for humans.
The public is forced to use AI at work and outside of work because the corpos are determined in inserting their AI everywhere. Then the people come back home and see that their energy bills have doubled because of AI datacenters. Of course people hate AI.
Yeah but the public is against progress. The public cries for material needs like medicare for all, universal childcare, a jobs program? These are all clearly foreign actors that want to prevent American progress on AI! They must be Chinese agents for all we know, what sort of American wants to provide healthcare for their family over proudly paying higher utility rates to ensure a new batch of tech bros become billionaires?
Why the horror? I'd prefer the gas remain in the ground, but given the gassy production of US shale oil, I guess I'd rather it be used for this than just flared. I am frustrated that pollutant emissions aren't being policed, and also that the sudden turbine demand plus supply chain issues mean using aeroderivative turbines that are quite a bit less efficient than more complex combined cycle turbines.
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/how-gas-turbine-power-plants-wor...
(And to head it off at the pass: if that can't be done then this should be done at all)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
We could have cheap and available renewables, but we instead destroy them in bureaucratic hell that nobody cares about.
Only about 35 percent is “associated gas” production from oil production.
I doubt this is really reducing the rates of flaring and leaky wells. Its just additional demand.
The biggest problem I've seen is they tend to build these somewhat close to residential areas with generation on-site. Often these power generation centers aren't right next to residential areas due to both air and noise pollution. But governments are often seeming to turn a blind eye.
In that world, natural gas just makes the most sense. The US hasn't build generation capacity in any meaningful way in decades. We've deindustrialized over time so it's been relatively okay, until a new form of industry (datacenters) starts putting pressure on the whole thing.
https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
It might be a little more expensive for them, but it's cheaper when you factor in the costs of pollution which they aren't paying for and which they're forcing us to pay for through increased diseases and global warming.
Sounds civil to me.
* Did they expect the next five buildings to also take between two and three years to build if done in the same manner? I'd hope it'd be significantly faster the second time because they've perfected the design, found good local contractors and suppliers, etc.
* How much of the time was the actual structure vs. all the stuff inside they still have to do with the tents?
* How long are they expecting to keep this? Are they anticipating extra problems like leaking roofs?
* What are the "off-grid power plants"? Is this basically a whole bunch of diesel or natural gas generators? [edit: oh, yes, "The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines". I wonder if they're trucking in the fuel too.] If so, yuck.
What is your source for this claim? It sounds like conjecture to me.
Neither power nor construction is easier in space than it is on Earth. Higher power means higher heat dissipation, which means higher-cost satellites or downsized AI hardware. Construction is monumentally more expensive when you have to ship GPUs and their associated infrastructure away from the planet where they're manufactured.
SpaceX's orbital compute will not compete against any ground-based AI capacity. It will most likely be used for edge processing of Starlink sensor data, either as an SAR solution, multiband jamming apparatus, or any other SDR applications used at the orbital scale. There is no other justification that I am aware of that necessitates space-based AI inference. The commercial space-based AI line is a glaringly obvious coverup.
Seems everyone else imagined a camping tent. Different backgrounds I guess.
Also, building rapid temp shells plus nearby gas turbines paints a very different picture than the one conveyed by the "clean-energy" PR around hyperscale data centers.
Heck, call it public housing and bringing jobs into the community.
Ofcourse that only works once the Dutch borg adapts!
I wonder how the security is. It's just a matter of time until organized crime will start paying attention to this. Perhaps a bet for polymarket?
Edit For a little more context xAI colossus 2 looks to be an empty warehouse on 3/10/2025. By 12/2025 they had already either filled the warehouse or they couldn't use the space because they appear to built multiple structures outside for the datacenter.
For comparison again meta already had that datacenter there for a number of years and then over 2 years added those structures. In 9 months it appears Tesla built a datacenter into an existing building and added structures.
The difference between Meta and tesla is that meta has done it many times before and in loads of countries.
You know and I know that The Product is at best nowt more than 'astrology'. The Product does do search engine things though, and it could be scaled down to fit in a phone or even a watch, to be good enough for 'the pub quiz' or for writing a gormless email.
As for the article, META does very little for the vastness of the corporation. They have gazillions of developers yet Facebook and Instagram are as boring as ever, Threads and the Metaverse are just lame and what else do they do, apart from serve ads?
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/new-from-mi...
and
Safety
Are opposites.
from a business perspective, which of those two statistics would you give more weight?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
in any case, its not really that complicated in this case.
- the ai companies have a billion active users and billions of dollars in revenue.
- a poll comes back with 30% of respondents saying they are angry about ai.
so, why do the ai companies keep doing ai things despite ~30% of people not liking ai? well, its because they are making billions of dollars in revenue from their billion users. from the ai company's perspective, it would be madness not to keep shoving ai everywhere.
Is is OK for them to build datacenters in US?
"People use AI so this must be a revealed preference" is such a bad argument when people are feeling so precarious
in the context of answering the implied question of the parent (everyone hates it so why do they keep doing it?), it does not matter at all.
If a large proportion of people are only using AI because they are being threatened with unemployment if they don't, then there's going to be massive resentment building up
You may think that doesn't matter, but it does. History has shown over and over that you can only keep a lid on massive social resentment for so long before things break
this does not matter from the business perspective.
microsoft does not care that your company forces you to use their products. google does not care that your school forces you to use their products. TSMC does not care that you are forced to use their products when purchasing ~any electronics. etc.
why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?
do you think all types of companies should heed the advice of gallup polls over their own metrics, experience, and research?
A good example of how this works is cocaine.
Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.
hypothetically, you own a widget company. you sell a lot of widgets. every month, you are selling even more widgets. the widgets are flying off the shelves. you keep ramping up production, and the consumers keep on buying.
gallup releases a poll that says "people hate widgets".
would you stop/slow down your widget production?
for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics
Capitalism abides by your dollars not your voice.
So people can decry ai all they want but if they keep using it, it won't go away.
Even then it's probable that AI is a big enough productivity boost for certain industries that even if no consumers used AI, businesses would still prop AI up enough for it to live on.
Simone Weil had good theoretical and practical observations on force vs economy 100 years ago.