Original comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1uyyywv/comment/oy3cgd7/
Trees vs. Data Centers
Photo 1: Memphis, TN (top)
Photo 2: Sandston, VA
Photo 3: Abilene, Texas
Photo 4: New Albany, OH
Photo 5: Fayetteville, GA
There is no greater threat to humanity, than humanity itself. There is so much evidence of this throughout history, and yet we have collectively learnt nothing from it. As a species, we are the most destructive force in existence, and time and time again the value of the almighty dollar, that we ourselves have created, is put first above all else. Even the existence of the only known planet that we can successively survive on, is put behind the priority of the dollar.
On the plus side, at least there’s no bloody rain in Melbourne this weekend!
at least there’s no bloody rain in Melbourne this weekend!
I should hope there’s no bloody rain…
(Sorry not sorry I had to. I needed a chuckle)
Yesyes but have you seen that shareholder value??
Makes me sad
Not even solar panels on the roofs.
Not even panels over the parking lots.
Ah yes Elon savior of the environment…
There’s all this talk of solar-powered space-based orbital data centers , but they can’t be bothered to put up cheaper, simpler, grid-relieving ground-based solar, on the real estate they’ve already got, when that would start producing some juice like right now? How does this make any sense?
Because solar on the roof won’t even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.
It’s just that somehow if they get to go to space, they decide they suddenly just need like two servers in a ‘datacenter’ instead of thousands. And they need to go to space because Elon says (checks notes) that it’s too hard to make more natural gas turbine parts…
Even if it’s nowhere near a majority of the power, I’m surprised passive cooling from solar plus some electricity isn’t worthwhile enough to be universal. It’s a small impact, but also cheap enough it’ll pay for itself, and many orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to get a datacenter into space, and figure out how to cool it
Especially since they’re looking for space for solar installations, farmers have started installing them, power companies and coops. Seems financially stupid to leave that much space unused when solar farms would go right on top.
And especially because elon owns a solar panels company and he loves to transfer money between his companies
Because solar on the roof won’t even be noticable against their power footprint. Given current practices, each square foot of a datacenter would need about 1,000 times more square footage worth of solar.
But (as I’m sure you realize) this would mean every watt from on-premises solar could get put to use immediately, no batteries, no power-grid buy-back schemes. Making those solar panels an unusually good investment.
Unless they’re not planning to keep it running for very long.
It smells un-serious, somehow.
Just like vaccines, some things need to be done in scale to reach their true effectiveness.
That one facility will always be as net negative for the grid. But with panels on all the other buildings in the area that aren’t a power sap, it would be significantly better.
We’re getting to the point where roof top solar is relatively cheap and worth the effort. I mean, there’s fucking fields near me that they clear cut and put ground based solar panels on, and it was profitable enough for the farmers to lease the land, and the company that owns the panels to get their nut. And a lot of those field based panel arrays are equivalent to, if not smaller than the massive Amazon warehouses we have nearby.
If large corporations pay their fucking taxes and did their fair share of infrastructure investment we wouldn’t even be having a conversation about global warming or about where we’re going to get energy for fucking stupid worthless data centers. The energy is in the fucking sky it’s free goddamn giant nuclear reactor you just need to put panels on top of shit to harvest it.
At this point in climate change time, it is criminal neglect to 1. clear a forest, 2. build a big steel/concrete box on it and then 3. don’t even put a green roof or solar roof. We need to be heading towards climate trials and people deciding this crap today still in companies with a near infinite capital available deserve life in jail without airco.
As long as they continue to spout pie-in-the-sky for-realsies gonna-be-fantastic totally-not-gonna-fall-apart-like-half-Elon’s-schemes plans for the future, they don’t have to spend ANY money on stuff like ground-based solar panel arrays, and they get more investors who get suckered by the pitch too!
Devils advocate, I don’t agree with this, but maybe because first to market and innovating quickly gets more money? The solar panels would be a bigger up front cost (they gotta make sure the building is rated for it, buy a bunch of wires if it’s out in a field, etc) than just paying the city for 6 months-3 years of electricity vs how much the return will be in the timed bubble we have?
I don’t think that’s a good business decision unless you think what you’re making isn’t going to last…. But maybe they know the bubble will pop and don’t wanna invest long term? It’s just dumb or evil.
VC money
The roof might be used for cooling, which is probably be a better use of space for a datacenter roof.
It’s a bit unfortunate the second xAI is taken in the winter, so we can’t really see how much of the trees are gone, but looks like a lot.
I’m genuinely confused about why the season matters?!
I can’t tell from this far away, but if those trees are deciduous then they lose their leaves in the cold weather
So a winter photo might not be as good of a comparison as a summer photo because even if there were exactly as many trees in each photo, the winter one would look like there are fewer.
In that region they typically hold on to their leaves and they slowly come off but keep most of it through the winter, depending on wind to blow them off.
You can still see the trees on the left and the right 🤔 like outer border is identical, just a swath cut through the middle. Season can have an effect but it seems pretty clear here.
Just zoom I’m, you can see where it is bare ground and how winter pic still has trees in the other areas. Don’t go just by colour itself but the shapes of the masses
I don’t like AI data centres, but try to get photos of the same month/season to make this point.
Not all development that removes trees are created equally, just saying. If it’s a new interstate power transmission line, solar or wind farm, new non-market housing, passenger rail line, it would be better than a data centre, ICE concentration camp, oil pipeline, intensive agriculture, etc. The end use matters more to weigh against, than saying clearing trees is never worth it as a blanket statement. If it is worth developing, officials have to weigh the importance the forest as a natural habitat compared to natural bogs, lakes and meadows as alternatives, to maintain biome diversity.
To me, the problem seems to be bad regulators. They could have mandated that data centers have solar panels on their roof. They could have mandated a certain amount of greenery around the warehouse, so that the area was less impactful. It’s been a known issue that unregulated Capitalism will cause mass destruction quite frequently for decades if not centuries. You can’t expect every business to ‘do the right thing’ every time…that would be stupidly optimistic of regulators.
This disgusts me and angers me beyond words
This in exchange for something that just invented nonsense words and inserted them into my science presentation?
Honestly amazing that these tech companies are able to make a building full of computers look like an open strip mine. They don’t even try to beautify the campuses or anything, just bare dirt and ponds full of acrid water. I live in taconite country and have seen active mining operations put in more care for the communities they invade then big tech does
I don’t agree with how data centers are being built out, but I also don’t think your assessment is accurate. The New Albany and Fayetteville sites look to preserve most of the existing trees. Abilene and Sandstone appear to be active construction.
And still no jobs…
This is violence against the bulk of humanity
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Summer vs winter picture, not a very honest take
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It would look the same for any commercial building - a warehouse, shopping center (would be even worse), etc.
No need to be disingenuous, it just weakens the argument and gives someone who disagrees with you valid ammunition.
I guess the point would be what does the local area get in exchange for losing their forest?
A lot of other developments at least provide the local populace some service or jobs. These are just “give me your land, your power, and water and we will use it to advance our business interests and do nothing for the locals”, oh and btw, give us a tax break for the privilege of having us build a datacenter in your area.
Now I’m being bombarded by ads saying ‘um, actually datacenters give you tons of permanent jobs and makes power cheaper’, so they are just flat out lying instead of actually doing anything to make it worth the local community. Well, except key people on local town councils who somehow end up with NDAs forbidding them from disclosing what conversations they are having with these developers…
Housing developments and apartment blocks are built on former forests in a similar timeframe too
At least here in the US the people arguing against data centers are also against housing developments and want to reduce urban sprawl (by say tearing down all the empty malls and building apartments there for example). At least that’s what it seems like to me, someone against the never ending suburbia.
Same
Destroying a forest area for a concrete jungle is never a good thing
Summer vs winter picture, not a very honest take
How so? Not like the data center will wilted away after the winter and trees grow back on spring.
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You can do the same with solar panel farms, orphanages, hospitals, community owned grocery stores, or any number of things that you would be happy with being built. Things need space to be built on. More at 8.
Yeah I’m gonna defend this
lmao what a clown. There’s plenty of abandoned stores in every city and empty lots. You don’t have to go tear up mother nature when we don’t even use the land we already have.
Yet they do, for things I mentioned among others.
And people would have a fucking fit if they put a datacenter in the middle of their town.
Solar panel farms actually work really well with rewilding projects. Not forests sure but if instead of where we grow fuel corn we instead dropped solar and rewild them for more power than the corn can provide plus biodiversity.
And as others said there’s plenty of empty spaces already existing that most of what you list can use. There’s two malls near me with half the shops or more empty, an abandoned hotel (though it was recently announced it would be converted into apartments so, ya know, proving my point) and a field bought by a hospital just being left as bare dirt (because they say they might need it some day).
Things need space to be built, but all of those other things you mentioned have value. It’s upsetting to cut down a shitload of trees for something that is going to be useless in 3 years when the AI bubble pops.
AI isn’t ever going away. It’s here to stay like cars, houses, the internet. It’s part of life as we know it, and it’s literally never going to disappear.
You think the world is just going to go back to normal LLM usage?
People still have houses and mortgages after the mortgage bubble burst in 2007.
The internet, ecommerce, and .com’s still exist after the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000s.
A bubble bursting doesn’t mean that thing dies and goes away. It means that the hype for it goes away and the market normalizes/corrects suddenly.
There’s a VC run and an attempt to force AI usage into things where it doesn’t belong, or serves no purposes, or completely alienates the user base. There is going to be a correction for sure, and its not going to be pretty.
No, people genuinely think AI is going away because it’s “useless” and doesn’t provide anything worthwhile. The comment I replied to said the AI data centre will be useless when the bubble bursts. If they don’t think AI will go away, why would they say that?
I’m anticipating that mixed-use data centers will have enough capacity to meet post-pop demand. The current ubiquity of LLMs will end once people are forced to pay the true cost. I don’t expect the technology to suddenly just vanish, but most people are not going to be willing to pay what it will cost to make inference profitable.
That depends heavily on the quality bar, not just aggregate capacity. Gemini 3.5 Flash qualifies on 42 of 52 tasks at a 75% bar, but only 15 at 100%—so routine workloads may remain cheap while demanding ones become premium. The real question is how much of today’s usage needs near-perfect output.
This behaviour is exactly why parts of the world are literary on fire right now. It’s not just the loss of trees, its the other impacts of these data centers too, such as increased use of fossil fuels.
And the sprawl encouraged by such development leads to a longer interface between wild and built environments which is more space to defend from wildfires
Controversial opinion: this is not the problem of the data centers, but the missing laws protecting the land containing a forest. Currently data centers are trendy, but they would also have made room for a regular factory. Now think about how much forest gets deforested in total, not just by data centers, each year.
Your argument is the difference between reactive and proactive legislation, and it’s what we need to do to actually succeed. We are constantly on the back foot because we are trying to stop one problem at a time, i.e. Data Center deforestation. Data Centers are a problem, but not the problem. Destruction of natural, irreplaceable resources is the real problem. Sure, it would be great to stop all data centers from ever being built, but then something else will just take its place. We need to protect our resources first, then it won’t matter what they want to build because they won’t be able to. Getting mad about data centers is good, we should be mad, but let’s make that anger work for us in the best way.
The caveat is that a lot of these protections can just be stripped away by whoever is in the oval office, as we’ve seen with this administration. When they don’t give a damn about poll numbers, they just do whatever they want with impunity. That’s why these need to be written into state constitutions and not just statutes, things that a Washington signature can’t undo. They need to be guarded in land trusts and conservation easements. Put too many stops between the bastards and their prize.
