Post #4915642 · Elektrine

2026-09-26 03:07 UTC

What I dislike is the lumping of all datacenters into one hated bucket. I suspect people don’t realize that, for example, the fediverse… exists in datacenters. Take away datacenters and the entire internet goes away. I think what people don’t want is a bunch of shitty datacenters (meaning using shitty power sources, for example) that are being built for AI or massive government/private data over-reach. You WANT some datacenters… This is like being against… prepared food. Sure, cooking from scratch is better, but outlaw all prepared foods and now you will be exhausted cooking every single day. We depend on some prepared foods. What we want is less added sugar, more healthy prepared foods, safer food, at a lower cost. We want improvements, not a complete ban. Same with datacenters.

Replies (3)

@yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-09-26 03:24

This is like saying that people against Big Oil don’t understand their own cars need gasoline. “Without oil, so much modern tech goes away.” Deep.

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@LodeMike@lemmy.today 2026-09-26 05:37

The U.S. has over 3000 datacenters, which is 10x 2nd place (Germany). Most are very small nondescript buildings near the airport.

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@echodot@feddit.uk 2026-09-26 08:41

I think the main reason is that people didn’t notice the old data centers. There is a data centre in my town about a two minute walk from where I live, I lived here for 3 years before noticing it. It’s just a non-descript massive gray building and somehow it’s kind of invisible. I could probably ask people who’ve lived here their entire lives if they knew about the data centre, and I suspect that most of them would swear up and down that there isn’t one. It doesn’t make noise, it doesn’t generate huge amounts of traffic, it doesn’t use that much water up if any, and it has its own electrical supply. I essentially live right on top of it, yet it has basically no effect on my life. According to Google Street view it was built some time between 2015 and 2017, so it’s not an AI data centre. These new AI ones require orders of magnitude more power, and cooling. They have a much larger impact on the local environment.

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