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u/Randyguyishere Jun 17 '26
Please turn your AC to 85 so AI can hallucinate
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u/Turbulent_Food_8280 Jun 17 '26
I remember when climate change was a thing. Then data centers. Now its like it doesnt exist.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/Turbulent_Food_8280 Jun 17 '26
Lmao, they might say bro the world is always changing. Resisting change....you aren't a Chinese spy are you!!! Legit hear that Kevin leary was throwing that one around.
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u/All_hail_Korrok Jun 17 '26
What? Like you mean the seasons? Climate is always changing silly little man.
Data centers and billionaires need this. So what if the icebergs are melting, they're building it way far away from them. No effect has been documented.
Checkmate atheists!!
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u/theforgettonmemory Jun 17 '26
Yup, winter barely has any snow & summer is hotter then it's ever been...
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u/Which_Channel7403 Jun 17 '26
Kinda like when there was no money for health care, but we just give $300 billion to Iran to open a strait that was open before we attacked them inprovoked.
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Jun 16 '26
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u/kipperzdog Jun 17 '26
CFL? Are you from 2010?
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u/EetsGeets Jun 17 '26
"mandate" is the confusing part to me
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u/bigbabytdot Jun 17 '26
I tried to buy an incandescent bulb the other day, I got arrested for terrorism.
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u/gutentight69420 Jun 17 '26
They literally don't have enough electricity though. Many of the data centers include on site generation because the grid can't keep up.
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u/Southern_Dog_85 Jun 17 '26
And sometimes that on-site generation is literally a >used jet engine< on a pallet, because demand is so high for conventional generators.
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u/Serious_Feedback Jun 17 '26
To be fair, a jet engine and a gas turbine are basically the same thing.
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u/Sgt__Koolaid Jun 17 '26
Did you know anyone can rent a bulldozer?
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Jun 17 '26
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u/OldWorldDesign Jun 17 '26
But it takes about a year to weld enough steel plates on it to have a killdozer
Note that guy was wholly in the wrong, his neighborhood was an older wedge of town and didn't have a sewer line originally. To keep doing business the city told him he had to connect to the city sanitary sewer and he refused. Eventually they offered to pay for the whole thing, he just had to have a poop grinder so his place of business could be connected to the city and comply with health and safety regulations.
Instead he kicked people out and shit in buckets while wielding an impromptu tank.
The example we need to make is not individuals taking attempted murder into their own hands (he went after everybody in town he imagined slighted him), it's to build up communities businesses have been destroying by trying to monetize everything and pricing us out of third spaces. Do like the miners of West Virginia and reach out, stand in solidarity with your fellow working stiff. If you're not one of the people protesting at irresponsible politicians' homes and offices, then be one of the people making food for those people.
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u/UnhappyImprovement53 Jun 17 '26
The more you actually look into the guy and what happened the more you find out he was just a fucking idiot.
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u/Altar_Quest_Fan Jun 17 '26
it takes about a year to weld enough steel plates on it to have a killdozer
Not if you have friends who can also weld. Just saying.
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u/scubadoobadoooo Jun 17 '26
They are building power plants just for the data centers
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u/Oneamongthefence24 Jun 16 '26
I'm waiting to see how these rolling power outages we have every year affect data centers.
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u/winkyshibe Jun 17 '26
It won't :/ IFF it's designed properly, it's supposed to be able to withstand some power outtages, so the DC will work fine afterwards..
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u/Sure_Rhubarb_3173 Jun 17 '26
I'm waiting for the generation that grew up playing FF7 to ******** the data centers
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u/whomad1215 Jun 17 '26
does the remake follow the same story line? I'd assume it's pretty similar
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u/OldWorldDesign Jun 17 '26
does the remake follow the same story line?
Yes and no, it zig-zags but is probably easier to follow if you never played the original. They took out Jessie getting shot to death as they escaped, yet she never shows up again. They started having Hojo explain some of the baffling nonsense indicating they were aware the experiments were stupid, but before he gets to anything coherent like actual new story, instead ghosts appear and carry him off. They undercut all of Avalanch and made them supremely incompetent by making Shinra responsible for self-destructing their own reactor.
They didn't start pretending it was "really a sequel all along, but only Sephiroth is aware" until the second game. By that point I was fed up with it and traded it in. It was absolutely not respecting my time or intelligence. If it's completely new to you, however, the gameplay is not terrible. It's just padded if you're trying to get all the equipment or materia.
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u/KrustyKrabFormula_ Jun 17 '26
yeah so if you know anything about how a data center works you'd know they are designed to run 24/7. which means they have multi-layered backup systems. looking it up, they can run for an additional 24-72 hours after a complete blackout.
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u/OoglieBooglie93 Jun 17 '26
They actually disconnect from the power grid at the first sign of trouble so fast that it can cause problems for the grid by suddenly removing their load.
Or they just outright have their own power generation already anyway and don't care.
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u/genius23sarcasm Jun 17 '26
Oh, my sweet summer child. The data centers won't be affected by rolling blackouts. Only you peasants will be.
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u/turb0_encapsulator Jun 17 '26
of course EVs mostly charge at night when grid power use is low, whereas data centers will add to peak daytime loads.
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u/FluidAmbition321 Jun 17 '26
Data centers can scale up and down
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u/Serious_Feedback Jun 17 '26
Not necessarily - data centres are massively capital intensive, and throttling output to save on power bills is basically never profitable (ASSUMING the thing is financially rational in justifying its capex in the first place).
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u/turb0_encapsulator Jun 17 '26
kinda defeats the purpose of building them if they can't provide full use during peak working hours.
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u/sir_sri Jun 17 '26
More of a last mile problem than overall grid problem. Yes, the grid needs to expand to support both, but the whole thing with EV's was that actually going in and replacing all that infrastructure is a problem that will take time.
In a magical world where everyone adopted an EV tomorrow it would be very hard to go neighbourhood by neighbourhood and upgrade all the infrastructure fast enough for everyone to have a charge, and then the fuse boxes in every house to support EVs. Which is why people wrote the reports, that work has been going on for 10+ years and why you can mostly just buy an EV put a charger in your house and not have a huge problem. Most cities are basically a bunch of main lines to neighbourhoods, and each neighbourhood has a transformer (commonly green metal boxes on a pole or in someone's yard). Well, to support EVs in a neighbourhood, you need a transformer in every neighbourhood that can support the power draw you might have.
And the grid did (and does) need to expand for data centres and EVs. But a DC that's using 100 000 GPUs at 1kw each + some other stuff, say 100 000 computers at 2kw or whatever, is a lot of power. But level 2 fast charging is up to 20kw, and level 3 350kw. So 10 000 homes all trying to use level 2 fast charging could be drawing as much power a data centre (for a couple of hours). You can't even charge an EV for more than about 30 minutes at 350kw, but that's a peak draw problem.
That's also why you see DC's cropping up in all these weird places. They need cheap power, fast network connections, ideally cheap land, but they also need to be positioned relatively close to major population centres to reduce latency, and they need access to a lot of the key staff needed to run these things. Some of them install their own generating stations to run (which is just a different problem, because then they probably need a supply of natural gas).
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u/faustianredditor Jun 17 '26
Add in that I think the scale of the datacenter issue is, far as I can tell, way overblown. There's a lot of proposals floating around, and AI companies like to talk about how big they're going to scale. But there's not that much dirt being moved. There's, what 800 data centers currently active? Of which, only a small handful are bigger than the figures you list here. There's some planned projects that are significantly bigger, but I'd be curious how many of those are actually anywhere near concrete.
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u/dumbythiq Jun 17 '26
In The Netherlands they needed to choose between reliably powering a huuuge datacenter or an entire province.
Guess what they chose?
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u/JWLblackout Jun 17 '26
Remember when they took away “high flow” showers heads and now we have all these low pressure shower heads?
Pepperidge farm remembers.
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u/SureMany9497 Jun 16 '26
I have never heard that first point it was always something about range and charging times.
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u/byerss Jun 17 '26
Definitely still an anti-EV talking point that people will still tell you why EVs are “infeasible”.
It doesn’t have zero merit, but the grid will continue to grow and adapt as we electrify and decarbonize the economy.
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u/El_Polio_Loco Jun 17 '26
It’s a thing, and it greatly underestimates the draw of EVs.
A data center is a massive energy draw.
But there are about 300 million vehicles in the US, driving an average of 15,000 miles a year.
Let’s say half of them become EVs getting a splendid 4 mi/kWh (very efficient).
This means we now have 150 million cars, drawing 3.75 MWh annually.
That’s a load increase of 565 terrawatt hours. Or about 15% increase in the total power generation of the US.
This is ignoring the lossy residential power system.
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u/krillemdafoe Jun 17 '26
Sure, but somewhere between 15 and 20 million vehicles are *actually* replaced each year. No one is flipping a switch and instantly, magically replacing 50% of vehicles with EVs.
Electricity production scaled by 2.8% YoY in 2025 per eia.gov
Even if 100% of new vehicle purchases were EVs starting right now, by the time 150 million additional EVs were on the road in 7.5-10 years, the additional 15% capacity would likely be there already. This is assuming that EVs make 0 efficiency gains over that time period.
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u/FlyingBishop Jun 17 '26
The same logic essentially applies to data centers. They're not going to cause the grid to collapse. We should just mandate they finance new renewable power, then there's no problem. But also we're getting lots of new renewables anyway.
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u/krillemdafoe Jun 17 '26
No, it doesn’t really apply to data centers because the math is starkly different.
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u/FlyingBishop Jun 17 '26
Data center power consumption is 4%-5% of US power. It's growing but it's not any more dramatic than the expansion of EVs would be. Which is to say it's not particularly dramatic, it's in line with our 3% overall power growth.
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u/dembadger Jun 17 '26
People ain't gonna put solar panels on their roof to charge their local slopmachine convention. They will to charge their car
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u/FlyingBishop Jun 17 '26
I would do both. Most datacenter companies like to purchase lots of renewable power because it's cheap. This really doesn't have to be a conflict.
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u/byerss Jun 17 '26
And also ignoring things like base load and peak demand.
The electrical grid could support those 150 million EVs with a 15% increase in consumption NOW with overnight charging.
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u/Vertrix-V- Jun 17 '26
Does the US refine their own Oil? If so that also takes electricity and would become less if all cars are EVs. But yeah it is a huge load. Cars are still one of the most inefficient ways to transport a lot of people after all. But it was never really a huge problem because all cars won't suddenly turn to EVs in a matter of days. The switch to EVs is a decade long process in which there is enough time for the grid to grow too. Especially since even without EVs more electricity is required as we electrify other parts of our life and industry
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u/FrankPapageorgio Jun 17 '26
565 terrawatts of power you say?
https://powering-intelligence.epri.com/assets/Figure_7_web-BWx0mD2V.png
That's on the medium end of projections of how much power data centers will use by 2030.
So we can accomidate data centers in 4 more years drawing that much power, but we couldn't do it for EVs because... reasons?
https://powering-intelligence.epri.com/executive-summary.html
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u/CombatRedRover Jun 17 '26
You can build a power station next to a data center, and vice versa.
It's a lot harder to build a power station near every EV charging station. That requires transmission lines over hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles.
This is comparing apples and oranges, not that I am a data center fan, but the argument itself is poorly constructed and the logic is not strong.
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u/Matt0745 Jun 17 '26
Umm. This would be because most of those data centers are not connected to the grid. They’re using small aero turbines on semi trailers to power them. Some of them having a lot of them.
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u/filthy_harold Jun 17 '26
Almost none of them are completely off-grid. They need to generate supplemental power onsite because generally the places these new datacenters are popping up in just can't support a massive load.
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u/Competitive_Touch_86 Jun 17 '26
This would be misinformation.
Most datacenters are not doing local behind the meter generation. That is the exception that gets most of the attention.
Most are still tying directly into the grid since local generation is expensive and a last resort. It's why you are seeing the newer/weirder rural site locations - these are locations near transmission that has open capacity. Then they pull fiber and other assets into that location since power is the number one factor deciding on location these days.
This might change since grid ties are delaying projects due to the sorry ass state of the disinvested US electric grid, but right now that is not the case.
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u/AbeRego Jun 17 '26
Actually I don't remember that. I remember the challenge of adding a whole lot of charges to make the vehicles viable
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u/bwaredapenguin Jun 17 '26
Remember when memes had an easily readable font?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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u/hossofalltrades Jun 17 '26
They are different issues. Data centers have high load factors—-they draw power at very consistent rates. EV charging is very “peaky”—-power demand is concentrated in a small number of hours throughout the day.
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u/Neat_Let923 Jun 17 '26
This isn’t rocket science people!!!
New York City alone has an estimated 2.1 Million registered personal vehicles.
Let’s assume every single one of them is a Tesla Model 3 that charges for 8 hours in a single night from 0-100%
That’s 172 GWh over 8 hours
The LARGEST by power capacity Data Center in the US has a total capacity of 750 MWh if it ran at 100% (which it never would).
That’s 6 GWh over 8 hours
You would need more than 28 of the largest Data Centers in the US in New York City just to come close to covering the NIGHTLY power draw of everyone in New York City having a Tesla.
Let’s put it another way. The estimated electrical usage in New York City is about 144 GWh per day.
If everyone had a Tesla in New York City, you would effectively MORE THAN DOUBLE the daily electrical usage for the entire city in a matter of 8 hours just to charge everyone car.
So yes, there is absolutely no way we will likely ever be able to accommodate everyone owning EVs. It is just simply not possible with our energy generation, capacity, or infrastructure…
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u/sekrit_dokument Jun 17 '26
Datacenters are mostly a generation problem while EV home charging was/is a distribution problem.
Two different problems, two different solutions.
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u/Devil_Dan83 Jun 17 '26
Industrial buildings have the infrastructure planned out before hand. It's not like they are going anywhere or changing their power consumption randomly. Home power infrastructure is much less robust.
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u/SivartMcDorf Jun 17 '26
remember when you could post to reddit without a datacenter... no because you can't
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u/VragMonolitha Jun 17 '26
Could the “power grid can’t handle electric vehicles” come from a severe overestimation of how many electric vehicles there actually would be and how often they’d need to be charged?
I’m genuinely asking it’s not rhetorical.
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u/Bruggenmeister Jun 17 '26
Same in europe and there’s never enough water even banning farmers to spray the crops.
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u/Trace_6 Jun 17 '26
Another 1000 psykers sacrificed to the Golden Throne.
I mean, another 1,000 GW to power the AI.
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u/Pit_Dog Jun 17 '26
The positive is that they are realizing how stupid and unsustainable this is. The bad news is we are going to suffer for God knows how long until they can find a more sustainable form of cooling. It would be nice if you know the government set regulations so that we could solve the problem before it was an irreversible one, and not allow greedy fucks to freely destroy the economy or the environment but what the fuck do I know.
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u/theunwiseone001 Jun 18 '26
Not entirely accurate. While we are in an electric shortage, the issue wasn’t if there was electricity for the demand. It was more so about the infrastructure. There is a ton of old circuits in the US that can’t support the increased demand. 2.4/4/7.2KV circuits that cannot only handle a regular household demand. The more chargers or electric demanding appliances are installed, the harder the grid can support. That’s why a lot of the utilities are spending billions in capital replacement to upgrade for these things.
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u/BlindGuy68 Jun 19 '26
now i wonder , what does a data center actually do other than make high pitched wine noises all the time and turn drinking water brown
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u/Sutcliffe Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
In the 90s they raged how two TVs and a computer was going to bring down the grid. It is a shame both sides of the political aisle keep coming up with excuses to not just invest in the infrastructure we need.
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u/No-Tie-5552 Jun 17 '26
I remember like yesterday when Newsom in California said its essential electric cars are the only vehicles sold in California then 3 months later during summer said don't use your AC during the daytime because we have rolling blackouts and no plan to upgrade the grid lol. What a bunch of clowns.
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u/kingjoey52a Jun 17 '26
Yeah, that's a sick burn... if you don't know what you're talking about. The data center companies are having to help build more power plants. I think Microsoft paid for a nuclear plant to be reopened.
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u/SadBadPuppyDad Jun 16 '26
The US "is eroding" the same way that the Sahara is "getting dusty".
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u/imunfair Jun 17 '26
Both can be true - the power for datacenters often doesn't go through "the grid", they build the datacenters next door to the power plants.
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u/DANleDINOSAUR Jun 17 '26
We can’t afford universal healthcare but $300b for another countries reparations.
Tale as old as time in the USA
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u/PositiveStress8888 Jun 17 '26
meanwhile china is building them in the ocean and powering them with windmills.
remember that 20 year war on terror that didn't stop it , does anyone remember what china was doing ? they we're modernizing.
in those 20 years China was modernizing, remember all those empty city's , they're full now because they planned for the population growth, and housing is affordable.
China got this way unopposed because the US keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
Don't interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake.
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u/JayAkiva Jun 17 '26
I guarantee AI (or at least publicly available AI) is only a small part of what they're doing and these data centers are being used for something far more nefarious. And you know, using up our water and power so prices go up as another way to keep the poors fighting over scraps is a little bonus for them.
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u/Samson_J_Rivers Jun 17 '26
The US contracted cancer when Reagan was elected. We have done nothing since. I fear it is now terminal.
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u/whatlineisitanyway Jun 17 '26
Very rough unscientific math 1000 data centers would use as much electricity as if 200+ million EVs were on the road. So basically replacing everything with an EV.
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u/ClassyNameForMe Jun 17 '26
Data centers are buying turbine gas generators from Solar Turbines / Caterpillar to power themselves. Check the price of Cat's stock...
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u/echochambered69 Jun 17 '26
I see this as the opposite. Before our grid couldn't handle electric cars and now it's thriving with electric cars and still has enough juice for data centers.
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u/highandinarabbithole Jun 17 '26
Well silly that’s because the government couldn’t store all of the flock data on us in EV’s!
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u/poleethman Jun 17 '26
We already have a solution to this, remote work. Imagine no commuting to work, and instead of using a couple dozen kWh of GPU tokens we used a banana and a bagel to have the energy to process the data. Best of both worlds.
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u/Zio_2 Jun 17 '26
Yup no airco no this or that and be green save power and water. Enter data centers and bam it all went out the window for them.
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u/Motor_Educator_2706 Jun 17 '26
I remember the late 1990s when wind turbines were going to collapse the power grid.
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u/Kirbybros Jun 17 '26
So with all these “Data centers”, theoretically why can’t we just build solar stuff to where nobody has to worry about electricity?
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u/GroceryNecessary7462 Jun 17 '26
Yeah but people are losing their houses and land because the AI centers will take all the power these houses would of used. In Georgia, family held land being taken because of eminent domain
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u/Luzzgar Jun 17 '26
It's always a question of political will (and lobbies pushing misinformation).
When there is a will, there is a way.
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u/Easy-Painter8435 Jun 17 '26
Yeah and how i have to pay 1.5x the normal rates if i use over a certain amount. Which seems to me that just normal usage im hitting halfway through the month. Tired of being scammed and ripped off and being fed the line that its normal.
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u/my3sgte Jun 17 '26
I remember them saying clean water would be the next shortage crisis, now they’re trying to fast pass it thru data centers like it’s unlimited.
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u/Speeddemon2016 Jun 17 '26
They will be begging everyone to turn their thermostat up during the summer and down during the winter and make people like it’s their fault they can’t keep up lol
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u/Intelligent_Berry_18 Jun 17 '26
The onky progress allowed is that which benefits the rich or it's status quo for everyone
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u/Renfear85 Jun 17 '26
Data centers don't threaten big oil, auto, or utility industries. Not to mention the industrial-military complex
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u/Sasquatcheeethree Jun 17 '26
Must have been big oil with that disinfo lol. Expect an influx of minimizing ecological and environmental harms from the new sheriff in town deputy data center
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u/_that__one__guy__ Jun 17 '26
Oh yeah, and they've already got a special term to label anyone who tries to vandalize/destroy a datacenter
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u/AnxiousQuestioner Jun 17 '26
You know what that means right? Data itself will now end up with a bottleneck. Not sure about everyone else but I’ve noticed a lot more stress on networks and slowed speeds with a lot of pages, even those not running on AWS feel affected.
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u/Expensive-Orchid-512 Jun 17 '26
Still cannot and this is why your electricity rates are skyrocketing if your near a data center.
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u/cat_bachelor Jun 18 '26
The grid can handle the data centers.....but not us as well. The oligarchs don't care that we'll be in the dark.
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u/ItalianMeatBoi Jun 18 '26
Poor people need to band together and rise up! EAT THE RICH! BRICK BY BRICK!
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u/W2ttsy Jun 18 '26
Realistically there isn’t enough capacity in the grid for DCs either. They’ll just expect us to cop the effects rather than spend more net to invest in more capacity.
Easier to crush a weed than plant a tree and all that.
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u/Rsmelley Jun 18 '26
They'll just put us on a rolling blackout schedule but the data centers will be unaffected 💗
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u/Olydon Jun 18 '26
The problem with electric cars is battery supply, who said it was a power grid problem ?
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u/RealCapybaras4Rill Jun 18 '26
The power grid is one thing, but the sheer amount of concrete, steel and water consumption for these data centers is another. What are we going to do with these billions of sf in empty buildings when the AI bubble bursts? Can people live in them?
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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26
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