> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit.
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
I have a friend (engineer) working on a data center in Texas. It is closed loop. What’s interesting is the chillers have so much condensation that they pump it out to sprinklers which water the desert which now has grass growing. So at least water doesn’t seem to be as big of an objection now. Power though? Still a problem.
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
It doesn't even have to be monied interests. Media as a whole is getting severely disrupted by AI and they (somewhat understandably) see the technology as being built on top of their content without recompense. As such they will latch on to any topic -- supported or otherwise -- that lets them push a negative narrative.
On the flip side a lot of people's jobs are likely being threatened by the technology, so there is sizeable receptive audience already.
They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests, really. However I'm also pretty sure a lot of players are engaging in submarine warfare as well (https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
> They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests
Because they are the monied interests.
What they don't want is for the conversation to turn from people blindly rejecting data centers (for any reason) to people saying wait a minute, let's embrace technology/AI but let users benefit from every aspect instead of being capital's bitch every second the day.
Just like xAI was regulated to not run more than 15 gas turbines? US lets companies get away with breaking things and punishes wrongdoing at most with a fine that's less than the money that was made by breaking the rules, so US regulations sort of don't matter.
On paper you can't do this, but in practice the fines for doing so (if they ever even reach your mailbox after you've bribed the local politicians, which you've done to get your center built in the first place) are just a cost of business. There are plenty of videos of people who live near data centers who now have sputtering water from their sinks, or water that comes out brown and unusable.
Right, all they're going to do is rip the concrete out and repour it, causing even more damage to the environment (concrete production and curing is unbelievably C02 intensive)
I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
Sabotage works by introducing friction into your opponents activities. Sabotaging one piece of one data center doesn't do much, but the more you do, the more outsized the impact.
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
This is also all the sabotage the saboteurs have volunteered to tell you about. If your opsec has allowed sabotage to happen, it’s prudent to assume there’s other sabotage you don’t know about.
Astonishing reply. It would also be in their interests for Nazis to eat three meals a day, tip their hat to old ladies in the street, and get a good night's rest.
very minor nit but no CO2 is released during concrete curing. And over time (decades) the calcium hydroxide in concrete reacts with CO2 to pull it out of the air, producing calcium carbonate.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
(producing the concrete of course makes a ton of CO2, since its basically the reverse reaction, which is accomplished by generating a lot of heat)
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
> now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
The rate of somebody actually being caught and handled by police is negligible. The private security still have to watch 24/7 and that's a private cost.
I mean, they're talking to newspapers using their real names. And they're admitting what they've done.
If this was actually about real sabotage and causing real damage, the move would be to do something similar to what they're doing (incur structural damage) but keep quiet about it. Let them continue building out the DC and then watch the floor collapse when it gets loaded with server racks. Chipping out some concrete that's been clearly marked:
> mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint
Is a very minor inconvenience in a construction project of that scale compared to having the building collapse when it's partially filled with servers.
I'm not sure what the actual size of the on-site construction crew is, but one that's going up locally here is budgeted at $1.7B for the initial build-out and up to $12B for the total investment including all of the hardware that'll run inside it. A bunch of cameras, potentially perimeter radars, and a few security guards are really really minor additional costs. The facility they're building here is supposed to be 500,000 sq.ft. The cost of all of the additional security for managing this problem is probably less than a single rack of servers.
I think XR would prefer your solution as well. Still I can understand young people’s frustration when we after years and years of knowing about climate change do so little and so few laws of this type are enacted.
But I agree that their strategy is lacking. It would probably be easier to get people in general to support it if it didn’t affect them directly, sadly.
I understand why people are frustrated with the current system in general. You wouldn't design it this way. We need more young politicians shaping the laws and more entrepreneurs improving society.
I call baloney. What percentage of the US Congress and governors, say, are people whose parents were in Congress and/or governors? I have no hard data, but my gut feel is less than 25%. That's basically not hereditary.
I think fossil fuel taxes are a great idea, but if one consumer, data centers, should pay it, shouldn't all consumers (private car owners) pay it too? That's the only way we'll be able to make good decisions about what types of fossil fuels are useful (i.e. more good than harm) and which are pointless luxuries.
No. Industrial vs consumer use is night and day. Industrial has much higher draw of resources and should pay more as a result especially when total capacity needs to increase specifically for them.
The reason an industrial use uses x times more than a consumer is because the industry is selling products and services to x consumers. You can't compare them 1:1.
Well the industrial should charge more to cover its costs instead of offloading the cost of its goods to consumers? Why does Walmart get to utilize food stamps or hyperscalers get to drain all the energy? Thats a massive public subsidy for a private corporation.
In the end the consumer pays. Why should the consumer pay tax on the fossil fuels used to bring them AI but not on the fossil fuels used to bring them to work? That's the inconsistency.
> Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.
I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.
Data centers should just pay anything really. They get massive tax breaks, eat up huge swathes of industrial zoned land, and piss off anyone nearby. And for what? 3 permanent jobs and a penny worth of tax revenue.
The extinction threat from AI to all organic species is a little more comprehensive than a little bit of extra concrete, per the people making the AI themselves (I disavow this etc. etc).
What exactly are they trying to accomplish? I doubt they would just abandon the project. They would just redo the concrete which would emit even more emissions.
In the interest of playing Devil's Advocate, even if they're unlikely to abandon an existing project over this, accounting for potential sabotage and the cost/delays of redoing work might change the calculus of future projects?
It’s as productive as people who glue themselves to roadways. It irritates drivers/commuters (who are then more likely to have a negative view of the cause) and it slows traffic resulting in even more fuel usage. Yet, they think they are doing something good.
Are we talking about the environmental impact? Or are we talking about the vandalism perpetrated by activists? Attention on the protestors is not necessarily attention on the protestors' cause.
I mostly see commenters quipping about how this will just mean the concert will have to be re poured, resulting in yet more emissions. The bulk of the comments are about the protestors, not the environmental impact of this data center.
Roadway gluing is designed to sway public opinion -> change politics -> affect the corporations.
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
Do you know anyone in the arts? Musicians? I see more AI hatred on average in those sorts of communities than in tech, where there's a pretty even split.
is it? from where I stand, hn seems to be one of the exceptionally few remaining places where the mods don't take sides so the obnoxious minority doesn't get to win arguments by silencing everyone else like they do everywhere else.
I don't know a single person under 80 outside of tech who isn't using ChatGPT or more on a regular basis. If you really think everyone hates it, you are being very selective in your information/opinion sources. Yes 100% of lefty journos probably hate it, but they are an unrepresentative elite, jockeying for cultural power.
Everyone uses it, but how much of the AI opposition do you think pays to use it?
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
The people around me who seem the most enthusiastic about AI are specifically the non techies using it to make slop images, event flyers, stylized selfies, and asking it if drinking glue is bad for their health.
I suppose if you're one of the people that live near where it would be built it might be worth sabotaging it if only to go another week without the incessant hum and brown, filthy tap water.
A port area that uses the same water infrastructure that runs to residential areas, yes. The saboteurs are not named but I would wager that the Dutch group talked about in the article recruited from the area, yes.
They threw balloons… over a fence, while they like drama, this is unlikely to have had any effect on a cured structural slab. I doubt they even managed to get industrial strength peroxide.
The point people bring up about concrete CO2 use is absurd. To me it screams of refusing to talk about the debate the protestors are having and instead trying to find any minor nit to pick, which then lets you declare that they're imperfect and therefore not even worth discussing.
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
I suspect many HN commenters would be surprised to learn just how much the general public are on the side of these activists, condoning if not outright applauding their actions.
Yep. Even in very red areas like Texas, isn't the public opinion something like 95% opposed? City councils keep allowing it despite this, clearly due to bribes. Whole situation sucks.
Sure you can build a data center near me, if your going to fund a new swimming pool and library with the taxes you pay. Also I get reduced local taxes? Even better!
Infrastructure building would be a whole lot easier, if people could directly tie it to tangible benefits.
It would be great if it worked that way, with the people living nearby getting concrete benefits from the new data center. Instead, they typically just see an increase in their utility bills.
If you think bribes are at all going to the constituents, you don't understand what a bribe is. This is a very different thing from them paying taxes back into the city.
Indeed. One of few things to grant me hope for the future is watching both the youth on the left and right start to stand up to these Silicon Valley ghouls and decrepit dementia politicians who make up the biggest domestic threat to the nation and its ideals.
My tinfoil hat says this isn't "spontaneous grassroots activism". Someone made this happen that benefits from this. Maybe a country that wants to mess with the Netherlands. Hell, it could even be a competing tech company.
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.
The environmental impact discussion is always incomplete because it only looks at AI in isolation. LLMs do exactly nothing by themselves, they are always used to facilitate some human endeavor, so we need to take a holistic view of the system.
That looks accurate and lines up with my previous numbers. A heavy day of Claude Code usage is equivalent to running 0.7 of a dishwasher cycle. Already that sounds pretty decent, but let's put that into context and refine the simplistic analysis a bit. Discussing footprints in terms of [electricity / water / CO2] tuples, that is approximately:
1.3 kWH / 2.6L / 540g
Compare that to a human's daily footprint (US averages, scaled down to an 8-hour workday; the numbers are actually higher if you look only at office use):
10 kWH / 102L / 4KG
As a % of the human footprint, that is ~ 13% / 2% / 13%.
Right off the bat water usage is negligible. But at a minimum if LLM usage saves a human 13% time at a task, we're at breakeven i.e. the LLM resource consumption is compensated by the savings in human consumption. Anything more than 13% and we actually start conserving resources on average!
Now I know the productivity impact of LLMs is a contentious topic, but my past comments include studies (from 2024, in the era of spicy autocomplete, long before coding agents!) showing ~30% boost in throughput and/or time savings. Interestingly the survey-based https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ finds a consistent 30% time savings across industries. A human completing a task 30% faster consumes ~30% less resources i.e. we save ~3.3 kWH / 34L / 1.3KG per day.
This gives us a net savings of 2 kWH / 31L / 760g per human per day!
Even with 2024 estimates of productivity numbers we are conserving resources! I would wager that a full day's use of Claude Code today offers a much, much higher boost.
You could say coding is a small part of software engineering, but then resource consumption scales down correspondingly. The upshot remains that for a given task overall resource consumption goes down with increased LLM usage! In fact, if LLMs were adopted across all knowledge workers to do all possible tasks, we could recoup the enormous environmental cost of training models in a few business days! Subsequent ongoing savings can more than compensate for a lot of the slop produced elsewhere.
So -- and tongue only partly in cheek -- if you really want to make an environmental impact, use LLMs more.
An obvious point, but if Europe wants sovereign onshore AI, they have to get these people under control. It's easy for Microsoft to simply build EU-serving datacenters elsewhere.
> In recent years, people from Extinction Rebellion Netherlands have focused heavily on large scale disruptive action of ‘business as usual’.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
I hate all this weird activist stuff. It's pointless. Someone just pays for it and the problem is fixed.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
Perhaps. On the other hand, the limiting factor for automation was never human labor, it was energy input. We went all-in on oil extraction and transformed it into energy and plastics and crops, to push the human population to 10x its size. Ironically, doing so multiplied the absolute number of people living in abject poverty.
Yesterday I watched Bernadette Banner visit a Loom Museum and try them out for herself. A few takeaways:
1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body
2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations
3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that they could eat and support their families, and incidentally became the top experts on weaving cloth during their lifetimes, which all basically collapsed when looms were automated and mechanized.
All of it - the car, the iPhone, the healthcare, the indoor plumbing, the air conditioner, the closet full of clothes - is only possible because of automation.
They are not "poorly industrialised", they are the other half of industrialisation. Think of the Rick and Morty episode where they split themselves into good halves and bad halves.
India does produce a lot of cloth, it's true. "the only industry in the country that has generated large-scale employment for both skilled and unskilled labour", says Wikipedia. So they're quite well industrialized for textiles specifically. I'm not sure where this leaves the argument, I'll assume it means you're both wrong.
I don't think these ideas are as toxic to the current political climate as you think they are. We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists integrating ideas like "children are useless eaters that are your property to command, make them give back from all that you gave to them" and "work safety and environmental regulations are an emasculating evil, real men want to breathe poison and take risks" right into the core of their platforms.
> We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists
Right wing populists are nearly as useless as left wing populists now. The people they put into power and now betraying them for monied interests and they’re powerless to stop them. Fools thought they were the harbinger but in reality they were just the vessel.
It’s why major populist characters like MTG and Massie are giving up and getting slaughtered by puppets in a suits in primaries. It’s why Trump has been friendlier to the neocons that spent years insulting him than populists that helped propel him to power.
The real ghouls on the right that need to be stopped are the neo-reactionaries. I knew we were headed for strange times when the Silicon Valley elites simultaneously opened their pockets for the second term. It was purely a power play and it’s seemingly been effective.
I suspect the populists, right and left will care no more for the world they envision than they would for the status-quo even.
Left-wing populists haven't got anyone elected, but right-wing populists got to be the most powerful person in the world, so that doesn't seem that useless.
Ruining concrete seems to go against extinction rebellion main goal. According to the World Economic Forum the co2 released during ciment production account for 8% of global co2 emissions, datancenter are estimated to contribute between 1 and 2 percent....
You think they did math on this? No, all he did was have a tantrum where they got attention to themselves and patted themselves on the bat for doing something.
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
Did the Data Center get canceled? If not, then no it is not ruined and instead what's going to happen? Is someone's going to scrape up a whole bunch of that concrete releasing a whole bunch of carbon dioxide and then someone's going to pour down some more concrete which will increase the CO2 in the atmosphere.
That sounds likely to be true. They'll move operations to a temporary building while they build a new one. To some extent their ability to make plans will be disrupted, but the effect those plans would have had on the climate is unknown: the result is just that the oil company behaves in a more stupid and poorly-planned way, while doing some extra construction.
Companies at this scale only speak existential threat. If you can't pose one, they don't even know you exist. I question whether this made enough of a dent to be noticed, but it's a start.
Companies at every scale speak marginal gains/losses. Microsoft looks at this the same way your local drugstore considers shoplifting. They will look at property damage in the context of potential revenue & margin, possibly accounting for cost of mitigations. If it continues to make sense, they will continue. If it doesn't they will consider raising prices until it does make sense, or relocating to jurisdictions with fewer elites play acting as activist proletariat. Since your local drugstore won't be local if it leaves, it's only options are to close down or raise prices or lock everything up.
Microsoft does tonnes of dumb stuff that decreases its profit. Renaming Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot, for example. As long as it has plenty of profit left, it doesn't really care. It would only care if the amount of lost profit became existential, reaffirming GP.
> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit.
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
I have a friend (engineer) working on a data center in Texas. It is closed loop. What’s interesting is the chillers have so much condensation that they pump it out to sprinklers which water the desert which now has grass growing. So at least water doesn’t seem to be as big of an objection now. Power though? Still a problem.
> Power though? Still a problem.
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
It doesn't even have to be monied interests. Media as a whole is getting severely disrupted by AI and they (somewhat understandably) see the technology as being built on top of their content without recompense. As such they will latch on to any topic -- supported or otherwise -- that lets them push a negative narrative.
On the flip side a lot of people's jobs are likely being threatened by the technology, so there is sizeable receptive audience already.
They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests, really. However I'm also pretty sure a lot of players are engaging in submarine warfare as well (https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
> They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests
Because they are the monied interests.
What they don't want is for the conversation to turn from people blindly rejecting data centers (for any reason) to people saying wait a minute, let's embrace technology/AI but let users benefit from every aspect instead of being capital's bitch every second the day.
It’s regulated in the US too. You need well and consumption permits before using tons of water. Water usage is approved
Just like xAI was regulated to not run more than 15 gas turbines? US lets companies get away with breaking things and punishes wrongdoing at most with a fine that's less than the money that was made by breaking the rules, so US regulations sort of don't matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(data_center)
Source?
On paper you can't do this, but in practice the fines for doing so (if they ever even reach your mailbox after you've bribed the local politicians, which you've done to get your center built in the first place) are just a cost of business. There are plenty of videos of people who live near data centers who now have sputtering water from their sinks, or water that comes out brown and unusable.
Right, all they're going to do is rip the concrete out and repour it, causing even more damage to the environment (concrete production and curing is unbelievably C02 intensive)
I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
Sabotage works by introducing friction into your opponents activities. Sabotaging one piece of one data center doesn't do much, but the more you do, the more outsized the impact.
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
This is also all the sabotage the saboteurs have volunteered to tell you about. If your opsec has allowed sabotage to happen, it’s prudent to assume there’s other sabotage you don’t know about.
Since the saboteurs are protesters they want to be loud and reveal everything they did (but not how, or their individual identities).
> my vendor sends me junk
Indeed. A single bad review of a product from a user, if justified, can build the impetus to destroy a product. Three bad reviews probably will.
Insurance costs too can be affected.
That's right, which is why saboteurs need to be dealt with on the harshest terms.
Too bad all those Nazi saboteurs back in the 1940’s weren’t all caught and dealt with! (Right?)
I am not sure what point you are making.
Lots of people sabotaged the Nazis. You think they need to be dealt with on the harshest terms.
It would have been in the interests of the Nazis to do so!
> It would have been in the interests of the Nazis to do so!
Then you should probably ask yourself why your recommended course of action is in the interests of the Nazis?
The Nazis were anti tobacco. If you're not pro tobacco, you should probably ask yourself why you have the same stance as the Nazis.
"You know who else reacted to foreign backed industrial sabotage campaigns? Hitler"
this is deep stuff dude. you should run for office
Astonishing reply. It would also be in their interests for Nazis to eat three meals a day, tip their hat to old ladies in the street, and get a good night's rest.
very minor nit but no CO2 is released during concrete curing. And over time (decades) the calcium hydroxide in concrete reacts with CO2 to pull it out of the air, producing calcium carbonate.
(producing the concrete of course makes a ton of CO2, since its basically the reverse reaction, which is accomplished by generating a lot of heat)This is too dismissive of the impact.
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
> now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
The rate of somebody actually being caught and handled by police is negligible. The private security still have to watch 24/7 and that's a private cost.
I mean, they're talking to newspapers using their real names. And they're admitting what they've done.
If this was actually about real sabotage and causing real damage, the move would be to do something similar to what they're doing (incur structural damage) but keep quiet about it. Let them continue building out the DC and then watch the floor collapse when it gets loaded with server racks. Chipping out some concrete that's been clearly marked:
> mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint
Is a very minor inconvenience in a construction project of that scale compared to having the building collapse when it's partially filled with servers.
I'm not sure what the actual size of the on-site construction crew is, but one that's going up locally here is budgeted at $1.7B for the initial build-out and up to $12B for the total investment including all of the hardware that'll run inside it. A bunch of cameras, potentially perimeter radars, and a few security guards are really really minor additional costs. The facility they're building here is supposed to be 500,000 sq.ft. The cost of all of the additional security for managing this problem is probably less than a single rack of servers.
But delaying the opening probably means that the decommissioning date is also pushed back. The total life span is probably unchanged.
It's similar to the people who block roadways to protest climate change. Usually it makes the commuters frustrated and doesn't change anything.
Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
> and doesn't change anything
It does change people that don't know about your cause against it, quite reliably as long as activism results go.
For climate change, everybody probably heard about it, so yeah.
"there's no such thing as bad publicity" once again.
If ever true, it's for brand recognition.
PETA's brand recognition has probably made more people anti-vegan than all other vegans put together.
I think XR would prefer your solution as well. Still I can understand young people’s frustration when we after years and years of knowing about climate change do so little and so few laws of this type are enacted.
But I agree that their strategy is lacking. It would probably be easier to get people in general to support it if it didn’t affect them directly, sadly.
I understand why people are frustrated with the current system in general. You wouldn't design it this way. We need more young politicians shaping the laws and more entrepreneurs improving society.
That can't happen, because political positions are basically hereditary. Do you know what happened to every other hereditary political system?
I call baloney. What percentage of the US Congress and governors, say, are people whose parents were in Congress and/or governors? I have no hard data, but my gut feel is less than 25%. That's basically not hereditary.
Anyone with hard data, step right up...
not literally parent-child hereditary but I mean the political class decides who succeeds itself
I think fossil fuel taxes are a great idea, but if one consumer, data centers, should pay it, shouldn't all consumers (private car owners) pay it too? That's the only way we'll be able to make good decisions about what types of fossil fuels are useful (i.e. more good than harm) and which are pointless luxuries.
No. Industrial vs consumer use is night and day. Industrial has much higher draw of resources and should pay more as a result especially when total capacity needs to increase specifically for them.
The reason an industrial use uses x times more than a consumer is because the industry is selling products and services to x consumers. You can't compare them 1:1.
Well the industrial should charge more to cover its costs instead of offloading the cost of its goods to consumers? Why does Walmart get to utilize food stamps or hyperscalers get to drain all the energy? Thats a massive public subsidy for a private corporation.
In the end the consumer pays. Why should the consumer pay tax on the fossil fuels used to bring them AI but not on the fossil fuels used to bring them to work? That's the inconsistency.
Is gas not taxed or am I missing something?
Exactly, you can't compare them and they should therefore be treated differently.
> Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.
I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.
Data centers should just pay anything really. They get massive tax breaks, eat up huge swathes of industrial zoned land, and piss off anyone nearby. And for what? 3 permanent jobs and a penny worth of tax revenue.
I was going to say 4 permanent jobs, because they have to hire a security guard.
But they'll just use AI powered flock cameras instead, so never mind.
I think there is a good chance that they didn't throw enough balloons to warrant replacing it.
I wonder if they bothered to get high concentration vinegar.
"high concentration vinegar"? You mean acetic acid? You'd have to be nuts to carry balloons of concentrated acetic acid.
This is a nonsensical, stupid and fruitless symbolic act. Why should someone be crippled, blinded or killed by their foolishness?
The extinction threat from AI to all organic species is a little more comprehensive than a little bit of extra concrete, per the people making the AI themselves (I disavow this etc. etc).
TrueAnon Rule #23, "Always Disavow"
What exactly are they trying to accomplish? I doubt they would just abandon the project. They would just redo the concrete which would emit even more emissions.
delay the project, bring attention to the problem, feel better about themselves by doing “something”.
“That achieves nothing” sounds like what a Microsoft PR person would want you to think.
> feel better about themselves by doing “something”.
"The real friends are the clicks and attention you receive along the way."
grabbing attention is literally the point of a protest so yes
In the interest of playing Devil's Advocate, even if they're unlikely to abandon an existing project over this, accounting for potential sabotage and the cost/delays of redoing work might change the calculus of future projects?
It’s as productive as people who glue themselves to roadways. It irritates drivers/commuters (who are then more likely to have a negative view of the cause) and it slows traffic resulting in even more fuel usage. Yet, they think they are doing something good.
Yet here we are talking about the environmental impact of Microsoft data centres in NL. We wouldn’t otherwise be.
Are we talking about the environmental impact? Or are we talking about the vandalism perpetrated by activists? Attention on the protestors is not necessarily attention on the protestors' cause.
> Are we talking about the environmental impact?
Yes, obviously. Scroll up or down.
I mostly see commenters quipping about how this will just mean the concert will have to be re poured, resulting in yet more emissions. The bulk of the comments are about the protestors, not the environmental impact of this data center.
Emphasis on "mostly" meaning that you do see people talking about the impact. There you go.
And talking about why climate protestors glue themselves to roadways!
Roadway gluing is designed to sway public opinion -> change politics -> affect the corporations.
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
Yeah people will hear about this and subscribe to chatgpt pro in spite.
You have to be special to think this is comparable to paint throwing on works of art or blocking public roads. Everyone outside tech hates AI.
Weirdly the only people I know who hates AI wholeheartedly is in tech.
Do you know anyone in the arts? Musicians? I see more AI hatred on average in those sorts of communities than in tech, where there's a pretty even split.
>Everyone outside tech hates AI.
ask ChatGPT to give you the definition of "echochamber".
Very unintentionally funny for you to say this here of all places.
is it? from where I stand, hn seems to be one of the exceptionally few remaining places where the mods don't take sides so the obnoxious minority doesn't get to win arguments by silencing everyone else like they do everywhere else.
Mods don't take sides on issues you pay attention to, maybe. They definitely take sides.
Watch: I'll say "free Palestine", and this comment will be deadened soon.
It just redirects me back to this site.
I don't know a single person under 80 outside of tech who isn't using ChatGPT or more on a regular basis. If you really think everyone hates it, you are being very selective in your information/opinion sources. Yes 100% of lefty journos probably hate it, but they are an unrepresentative elite, jockeying for cultural power.
Everyone uses it, but how much of the AI opposition do you think pays to use it?
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
They probably use Apple Intelligence and Siri inside their iPhones, which are now powered by ChatGPT as well.
So that's pretty much everyone
The people around me who seem the most enthusiastic about AI are specifically the non techies using it to make slop images, event flyers, stylized selfies, and asking it if drinking glue is bad for their health.
I suppose if you're one of the people that live near where it would be built it might be worth sabotaging it if only to go another week without the incessant hum and brown, filthy tap water.
It’s port area. Are you certain the protestors/saboteurs were locals?
A port area that uses the same water infrastructure that runs to residential areas, yes. The saboteurs are not named but I would wager that the Dutch group talked about in the article recruited from the area, yes.
They threw balloons… over a fence, while they like drama, this is unlikely to have had any effect on a cured structural slab. I doubt they even managed to get industrial strength peroxide.
The point people bring up about concrete CO2 use is absurd. To me it screams of refusing to talk about the debate the protestors are having and instead trying to find any minor nit to pick, which then lets you declare that they're imperfect and therefore not even worth discussing.
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
That is a good excuse for Microslop to address the overcapacity and stop building more data centers. KOSPI is down again.
If they really wanted to have an impact on data center construction, they'd sneakily spill some silicone oil in semiconductor fab cleanrooms.
Yes, or get computer science degrees, get hired to design those chips, and then insert a backdoor! /s
Level of effort is a thing.
EDIT: And Cryo32 said the same thing elsewhere, a few minutes ago!
They should be jailed.
Were they arrested? This definitely sounds illegal.
I suspect many HN commenters would be surprised to learn just how much the general public are on the side of these activists, condoning if not outright applauding their actions.
Yep. Even in very red areas like Texas, isn't the public opinion something like 95% opposed? City councils keep allowing it despite this, clearly due to bribes. Whole situation sucks.
I mean bribes can be good.
Sure you can build a data center near me, if your going to fund a new swimming pool and library with the taxes you pay. Also I get reduced local taxes? Even better!
Infrastructure building would be a whole lot easier, if people could directly tie it to tangible benefits.
It would be great if it worked that way, with the people living nearby getting concrete benefits from the new data center. Instead, they typically just see an increase in their utility bills.
You can even heat the swimming pool with the waste heat.
If you think bribes are at all going to the constituents, you don't understand what a bribe is. This is a very different thing from them paying taxes back into the city.
Indeed. One of few things to grant me hope for the future is watching both the youth on the left and right start to stand up to these Silicon Valley ghouls and decrepit dementia politicians who make up the biggest domestic threat to the nation and its ideals.
Same with anti vaxxers, 5g truthers and Trump voters
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Oh FFS no it isn't chinese propaganda or whatever, people are just fed up with slop
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My tinfoil hat says this isn't "spontaneous grassroots activism". Someone made this happen that benefits from this. Maybe a country that wants to mess with the Netherlands. Hell, it could even be a competing tech company.
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.
The environmental impact discussion is always incomplete because it only looks at AI in isolation. LLMs do exactly nothing by themselves, they are always used to facilitate some human endeavor, so we need to take a holistic view of the system.
I had previously done some napkin math (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659) which found LLMs + humans are way more efficient than humans alone, but that analysis is by definition simplistic, and as some point out, does not account for outliers like coding. Fortunately, I just came across this source: https://gist.github.com/mdodkins/9b49624855cc41570c9d1012e0d...
That looks accurate and lines up with my previous numbers. A heavy day of Claude Code usage is equivalent to running 0.7 of a dishwasher cycle. Already that sounds pretty decent, but let's put that into context and refine the simplistic analysis a bit. Discussing footprints in terms of [electricity / water / CO2] tuples, that is approximately:
1.3 kWH / 2.6L / 540g
Compare that to a human's daily footprint (US averages, scaled down to an 8-hour workday; the numbers are actually higher if you look only at office use):
10 kWH / 102L / 4KG
As a % of the human footprint, that is ~ 13% / 2% / 13%.
Right off the bat water usage is negligible. But at a minimum if LLM usage saves a human 13% time at a task, we're at breakeven i.e. the LLM resource consumption is compensated by the savings in human consumption. Anything more than 13% and we actually start conserving resources on average!
Now I know the productivity impact of LLMs is a contentious topic, but my past comments include studies (from 2024, in the era of spicy autocomplete, long before coding agents!) showing ~30% boost in throughput and/or time savings. Interestingly the survey-based https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ finds a consistent 30% time savings across industries. A human completing a task 30% faster consumes ~30% less resources i.e. we save ~3.3 kWH / 34L / 1.3KG per day.
This gives us a net savings of 2 kWH / 31L / 760g per human per day!
Even with 2024 estimates of productivity numbers we are conserving resources! I would wager that a full day's use of Claude Code today offers a much, much higher boost.
You could say coding is a small part of software engineering, but then resource consumption scales down correspondingly. The upshot remains that for a given task overall resource consumption goes down with increased LLM usage! In fact, if LLMs were adopted across all knowledge workers to do all possible tasks, we could recoup the enormous environmental cost of training models in a few business days! Subsequent ongoing savings can more than compensate for a lot of the slop produced elsewhere.
So -- and tongue only partly in cheek -- if you really want to make an environmental impact, use LLMs more.
An obvious point, but if Europe wants sovereign onshore AI, they have to get these people under control. It's easy for Microsoft to simply build EU-serving datacenters elsewhere.
If you believe AI will become increasing important, which most people in tech seem to agree on.
Having data centers in your country seems incredibly important, especially to the EU. You'd really hope to see the exact opposite of this behaviour.
Who is Europe? I'm sure Ursula vdL wants onshore AI since she can tax it.
Is hyperscale a branding term?
That's a pretty solid name, despite not agreeing with their methods here.
> In recent years, people from Extinction Rebellion Netherlands have focused heavily on large scale disruptive action of ‘business as usual’.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
Cluster B society tantrums
Demeaning people who are trying to improve the world is pathetic.
I concur.
> amid growing worker opposition
lol this is not "worker opposition", these are the antics of over educated downwardly mobile elites.
I hate all this weird activist stuff. It's pointless. Someone just pays for it and the problem is fixed.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
If they keep doing it will they keep paying for it?
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To be clear, you mean shot?
Many of the mentally ill AI people on X supported the ICE executions in Minneapolis.
Maybe the loom smashers should have won. I'm not sure we ended up on the better timeline.
Prior to industrialization everyone was broke and people regularly starved.
If the loom smashers had their way, we'd still be dirt farmers living in abject poverty.
Perhaps. On the other hand, the limiting factor for automation was never human labor, it was energy input. We went all-in on oil extraction and transformed it into energy and plastics and crops, to push the human population to 10x its size. Ironically, doing so multiplied the absolute number of people living in abject poverty.
Post-industrialization, same thing but the starving broke people are far away and speak a different language
Yesterday I watched Bernadette Banner visit a Loom Museum and try them out for herself. A few takeaways:
1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body
2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations
3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that they could eat and support their families, and incidentally became the top experts on weaving cloth during their lifetimes, which all basically collapsed when looms were automated and mechanized.
But also, it is important to remember that automating and mechanizing is what brought society as a whole out of abject poverty.
It would be very short-sighted to look only at the jobs lost by the few weavers, and not the wealth gained by everyone else.
You mean the wealth gained by the ruling nobility of the time. As they said, the loom operators were worked to the bone for almost no pay.
No, I mean the wealth you and I have right now.
All of it - the car, the iPhone, the healthcare, the indoor plumbing, the air conditioner, the closet full of clothes - is only possible because of automation.
There are multiple billions of people alive, right now, who have none of those things.
Yeah, people who live in areas that are poorly industrialized (Africa, India, etc) and whose lives have not yet been blessed with automation.
They are not "poorly industrialised", they are the other half of industrialisation. Think of the Rick and Morty episode where they split themselves into good halves and bad halves.
The industrialization of rich nations did not make Africa poor.
Once upon a time, everyone was poor. Then, some countries industrialized and others didn't. The ones that didn't are still poor today.
Some countries like China have recently pulled themselves out of poverty through industrialization. Someday Africa will do the same.
Oh. What are the cobalt mines for then? Why were countries called banana republics?
I wasn't aware that looms made iPhones.
India does produce a lot of cloth, it's true. "the only industry in the country that has generated large-scale employment for both skilled and unskilled labour", says Wikipedia. So they're quite well industrialized for textiles specifically. I'm not sure where this leaves the argument, I'll assume it means you're both wrong.
Luddites were campaigning against child labour and dangerous working conditions, amongst other things. Pick which side of history you want to be on!
> child labour and dangerous working conditions
I don't think these ideas are as toxic to the current political climate as you think they are. We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists integrating ideas like "children are useless eaters that are your property to command, make them give back from all that you gave to them" and "work safety and environmental regulations are an emasculating evil, real men want to breathe poison and take risks" right into the core of their platforms.
> We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists
Right wing populists are nearly as useless as left wing populists now. The people they put into power and now betraying them for monied interests and they’re powerless to stop them. Fools thought they were the harbinger but in reality they were just the vessel.
It’s why major populist characters like MTG and Massie are giving up and getting slaughtered by puppets in a suits in primaries. It’s why Trump has been friendlier to the neocons that spent years insulting him than populists that helped propel him to power.
The real ghouls on the right that need to be stopped are the neo-reactionaries. I knew we were headed for strange times when the Silicon Valley elites simultaneously opened their pockets for the second term. It was purely a power play and it’s seemingly been effective.
I suspect the populists, right and left will care no more for the world they envision than they would for the status-quo even.
Left-wing populists haven't got anyone elected, but right-wing populists got to be the most powerful person in the world, so that doesn't seem that useless.
Looms at least produced something useful as opposed to hot air and SEO slop.
based
bring back asylums
Love this
I expect this article to top the HN page, since both people aghast and supportive of the sabotage will upvote
Ruining concrete seems to go against extinction rebellion main goal. According to the World Economic Forum the co2 released during ciment production account for 8% of global co2 emissions, datancenter are estimated to contribute between 1 and 2 percent....
Math is not theirs forte!
I imagine their maths is fine. Their objective is to tackle climate change through raising awareness. That happens at the macro scale.
Ah yes, the majority of people obviously don't know about climate change!
It's far grimmer to realise that people know, they just don't think we have an acceptable answer yet.
I'm not willing to accept any climate action, if it means I can't go on holiday abroad or it makes my life meaningfully more expensive etc.
It's selfish, but we need to solve it in a way that makes people globally richer.
(This is one of the great things about renewables coming down in price)
You think they did math on this? No, all he did was have a tantrum where they got attention to themselves and patted themselves on the bat for doing something.
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
The ecological results of the protest are negligible, so I don't know why people keep bringing it up
Well they didn't ruin a batch of cement at a cement plant did they? They ruined a datacenter construction project, specifically.
Did the Data Center get canceled? If not, then no it is not ruined and instead what's going to happen? Is someone's going to scrape up a whole bunch of that concrete releasing a whole bunch of carbon dioxide and then someone's going to pour down some more concrete which will increase the CO2 in the atmosphere.
This would still pollute less than the usage of the center. You're underestimating how much energy they use once active.
You are underestimating how much co2 is released during ciment production and overestimating what is released by powering datancenters.
In 2024, datancenter have consumed 1% of the total worldwide electricity production and are responsible for 0.5% of the co2 emissions.¹
1- https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...
cement is responsible for 8% I heard
So basically you think burning down an oil company HQ increases climate change?
That sounds likely to be true. They'll move operations to a temporary building while they build a new one. To some extent their ability to make plans will be disrupted, but the effect those plans would have had on the climate is unknown: the result is just that the oil company behaves in a more stupid and poorly-planned way, while doing some extra construction.
What if every time the oil company got a new HQ, it burned down? Would that increase or decrease climate change?
Companies at this scale only speak existential threat. If you can't pose one, they don't even know you exist. I question whether this made enough of a dent to be noticed, but it's a start.
Companies at every scale speak marginal gains/losses. Microsoft looks at this the same way your local drugstore considers shoplifting. They will look at property damage in the context of potential revenue & margin, possibly accounting for cost of mitigations. If it continues to make sense, they will continue. If it doesn't they will consider raising prices until it does make sense, or relocating to jurisdictions with fewer elites play acting as activist proletariat. Since your local drugstore won't be local if it leaves, it's only options are to close down or raise prices or lock everything up.
That's a problem if your goal is to get them to lower prices, but it's a win if you're trying to get them to go away.
Microsoft does tonnes of dumb stuff that decreases its profit. Renaming Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot, for example. As long as it has plenty of profit left, it doesn't really care. It would only care if the amount of lost profit became existential, reaffirming GP.