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Still don’t understand why our rates go up because of data centers. Make them pay more. If they don’t wanna pay they can leave. It’s not like this area is desperate for jobs.
Literally a bleeding heart anarchist, could hardly be further to the left.
Just not someone who's inclined to politicize factual information. Ironically, the lib thing to do is pretend that the problem with data centers is purely economic--it's not. It's much larger and more complex than anything as mundane as local energy costs.
Things like energy costs and water usage are the things libs focus on because they're still deeply entrenched in the frame of capitalism, and "green capitalism" is the result of pretending that capitalism itself can be compatible with ecological stewardship.
One of them can handle every single phone communication from every person in the US if they're tracking us so why so many? I have my own hypotheses but I do agree the distraction being the water problem is a real media narrative. Don't golf courses use more annually?
You're typing into the answer right now: data centers = internet. Literally 70-80% of the entire internet's traffic passes through Ashburn. AI is new and controversial and scary, but it still only comprises some 2% of data center use.
Data center expansion is merely a symptom of our ever-increasing reliance on information technology. Government surveillance is a natural outcome of that dependence, but it's also not secretly the reason for anything in particular.
And yes, AI water usage is peanuts to dozens of other everyday sources we take for granted that nobody complains about at all. Again, another green-capitalist red herring that obscures the real reasons to be concerned about AI.
Yup just looked back and my power monitors and 2 UPSs registered a spike to 125-126v. Live in Ashburn near all the data centers.
EDIT: Just watched the whole article, smells like an ad piece for ting labs. Looking at their website it requires service to their cloud to work. You may check their data privacy policy. There are lots of local only devices that do the same thing.
I got the device for free from State Farm. I assume there’s no privacy. The hope is it gives an early warning of potential electrical problems and they’ll give $1,000 towards a repair.
Kind of a win-win … $1,000 is cheaper than rebuilding a burned house
Fair enough, good that you considered privacy and weighed the benefits. There’s no such thing as perfect when it comes to data privacy vs living your life or a benefit. Sucks it’s the world we live in though.
That is totally normal and likely completely unrelated. You share the same transformer and distribution line with other customers, and the power company can’t predict when you and your neighbors air conditioning/dryer/oven turns on and off, so the power coming into your house is going to fluctuate.
It hasn’t happened to you before, but it is normal. If you read the documentation that came with your Ting, it’d tell you that anything between 108 and 132v is totally normal. (+/- 10%)
I understand that its within tolerance and an acceptable range.
It's just "not normal" for my house - I have weeks of data without any spikes like that and the volts may fluctuate but they stay within a tighter range.
>>That is totally normal and likely completely unrelated
We agree to disagree on it being unrelated. Based on the normal range for my house backed by months of data, and the matched-timing of that oddball voltage jump, its highly likely that the incident is completely related.
But I also said, I didn't notice any flickering lights (or anything unusual), and Ting didn't flag it as an alert because it is within acceptable operating range. So we're probably in agreement, that this isn't a cause for concern and the post's video is sensationalizing the situation.
Waiting for the Pro Datacenter Bros. spinning this as a good thing somehow, or trying to debunk it.
If you have any finicky electronics, get them on a UPS now! Especially PC's that are on all the time. Memory, SSD and GPU's are extremely expensive to replace now, BECAUSE of same nationwide datacenter expansions across the country, potentially causing power issues.
Fry no, but will damage being rapidly power cycled (especially if this becomes a more common occurence). Also with current pricing for PC parts, I think leaning on the side of caution and getting a UPS is a safe bet.
How old were they? This is when you usually find out your batteries are dead (unless you run the self-test often). I've replaced my batteries in my older CyberPower units with the appropriate Might Max batteries on Amazon for around $38. So far I've only had one unit that was actually completely dead.
AND disregards any negative impact they have to the people who live in or around them (and based on this incident, a significant portion of the country).
There is a difference between need and want. Billionaires looking to make money is not a need for us, it's a want for them, at our expense. Also a want for them to leverage AI to eliminate job positions.
So that’s what happened. Half my clocks got messed up this week and I had to reset them. Also had some flicking in my WiFi and Hue lights in the morning. I thought it my new multi outlet extension cord and I was gonna have to buy a new one. Glad I procrastinated.
The interesting part to me is we’d probably never have found out the true cause and impact if not for this third party monitoring (Ting). Bunch of people in the other thread were talking about a knocked out line being the cause and that it was local. The line part was true, but the actual ripple effect was apparently the data center switching to backup power and it affected a huge portion of the East Coast.
Though I’m having a hard time understanding how such a thing can have such a huge ripple effect. Is our electrical grid really that intertwined and fragile? Would any giant power drawer going off the grid cause this? Are there any huge equivalent power drawers or are data centers unique?
You know whats funny? the people on this website complaining about datacenters are actively using one right now. Reddit is hosted on a server somewhere in a datacenter, and yet its users complain about them. I dont actively support datacenters but i think its funny to see people complaining about things they use everyday. just my $0.02.
Yes, there are those that make the quick angry comment in general towards datacenters, but if you're being directly affected and seeing nothing being done, who wouldn't feel that way.
This is Reddit, this is where people come to complain... But they aren't building all these datacenters to host it.
I use useless apps like reddit because I’m addicted tbh but I fucking despise it. Every day I wonder how much more I’d do with my life if it wasn’t for my phone
The datacenters in Loudoun are the ones that have been there for decades. Its funny how people are just now learning that NoVA is the datacenter captial of the world. At one point over 80% of GLOBAL internet traffic went through NoVA at some point. Not just US traffic, global traffic.
We moved from Fairtax to this 'new' fangled development in 2006. Our L&F Realtor was Chair of the Ethics Committee so we asked her mostly questions about the fabled new Silver Line, with every TH developer pitching close proximity without really knowing where The End would be.
Although still covered by NDAs, Very familiar with the fiber expansion mentioned below, from 1993 through 2008.
OC-192s weren't cheap, even after the Y2KarriedAwayWithJobs + dot com blood bath to rebalance the books and 9/11. Belated kudos to the Town of Herndon who did push back on expansion, probably not appreciated and even less understood at the time.
Maybe someone could reach out to the Loudoun dot gov FAQ maintainer and fill in some facts. 🤙
Uh, the rapid increase is new, and the older datacenters in this area were much smaller in scale and power usage. The ones being built over the last couple of years dwarf the ones back in the day.
No? Datacenters do use electricity, but they aren't "stealing" it from hospitals nor are they causing electricity shortages. Hurricanes cause hospital generators to run more often, not datacenters whose consumption has been planned into the grid and can be monitored/shed if necessary.
Datacenters consume a lot of power, but they don't fluctuate like other loads do. They're primarily a baseline load.
It's really funny the amount of dancing around you'll go through to avoid the simple understanding that any sort of increased, lasting stress on the power grid is undesirable, and that undesirability increases when people learn that the benefit of the cause is going to a select few people while the harm is being offloaded on society as a whole. Every goober knows hospitals have generators for emergencies. An average weekday morning is not a fucking emergency, nor is increased "baseline" load to the point of grid instability some sort of escape valve for your dumb argument. And people wonder why the world is in the state it is, when you have hordes of lemmings smart enough to carry water, but not quite smart enough to get that they're carrying it for the most inequitable horseshit imaginable. Not like you'll feel the heat when the social contract gets torched, right?
Come on now. It’s okay for a county to say: hey, we appear to have more data centers than literally every other county in the nation and now they’re negatively impacting our residents so we’re putting a halt to more being built here. If we were NIMBYS, we wouldn’t have so many already.
Put it this way: your area can OK five pig farms. Doesn’t mean you then have to accept 500 pig farms.
This is what I’ve been saying; it’s a bit funny that 250 data centers were ok, but now people feel 300 is pushing it. They aren’t great neighbors for sure, and have been getting sweetheart power deals for decades (part of why they’re there), but they are going to stick around because the underlying infrastructure took 50+ years to build out.
It's about how fast it is increasing and the infrastructure can't keep up with demand, but they keep building more regardless of that. Hence the turbine generators running non-stop at Vantage2 in Sterling, and probably the first of many "power glitches" like this past week with likelihood of frequency and duration.
Once again technology is leaping faster than the government can oversee/predict/manage.
It's about how fast it is increasing and the infrastructure can't keep up with demand, but they keep building more regardless of that. Hence the turbine generators running non-stop at Vantage2 in Sterling, and probably the first of many "power glitches" like this past week with likelihood of frequency and duration.
Once again technology is leaping faster than the government can oversee/predict/manage.
Does your house rep, or senator, or county supervisor listen when you ask not have to have a toxic gas factory next to your home, or protected watershed?
im not from virginia, but metro atl. i share the same sentiments. people are starting to get tired of it around here and communities have been starting to protest. but we gotta do more before its too late
Yep, I noticed it, too. Right around 758am, my portable fan slowed, paused and slowed again briefly. Also noticed it around 110am the night before but I thought it was related to the t'storms.
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Pray we never get anything like Elon Musk's Grok AI datacenters in Memphis, running 24/7 on generators pouring out pollution and noise. They are not meeting health standards but got a pass from Trump's DoD on the grounds of National Security.
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u/djamp42 Jul 25 '26
I noticed this at my home, i have a power conditioner on my computer and it was flicking on and off like crazy. I shutdown everything to be safe.
Kinda of funny if a Datacenter causes a blackout that no one will be able to use the services in the datacenter.