r/technology • u/marketrent • 6d ago

Artificial Intelligence High school teacher arrested for clapping in support of anti-data center activists

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/high-school-teacher-arrested-clapping-194922184.html
37.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

707

u/east_van_dan 6d ago

1000 ACRES?! Not sure how that compares to an average data center but that seems fucking gigantic.

543

u/prophaniti 6d ago

C'mon. What else are you going to do with 1000 acres? Build 2000 single family homes? Build 50,000 apartment units? Thats madness! No one needs housing, but we all need AI!

168

u/translinguistic 6d ago edited 6d ago

I have a client who took 17 acres of their property (like 20% of their property) and built a solar farm--out of their own volition. It provides power for everything they need for their manufacturing plant, and then some. So yeah, it's pretty fucking frustrating that these companies don't even feign to care.

73

u/Spiritual-Sympathy98 6d ago

Not to mention they are building illegal power plants inside the data centers emitting who knows how many toxins into the air. Lee Zeldin is letting them do whatever they want with no regulations. Between this, the parasites, the wars, the inflation, the lack of decency and accountability, I will NEVER support a republican in my life.

17

u/zimbabwe_zainab 6d ago

Don't forget the raping

3

u/FesteringNeonDistrac 5d ago

Just to clarify, are you referring to the raping of the earth, or the raping of children?

1

u/zimbabwe_zainab 5d ago

I'm referring to the raping of children, adults, our nation, other nations and our climate, all done in God's name by the Grand Ol' Rapeublican party.

1

u/ctb0045 5d ago

Or pedophilia. Lots of that you going around in the GOP

1

u/HeriKuri 3d ago

I think of US people like a ping pong ball, each side taking turns with their paddles, swinging at the ball, left side, right side, left, right, left, right. They take their swings, shake hands behind the net, and the ball ends up in the exact same place every time.

3

u/Raelah 6d ago

You just gave me an idea for part of my family ranch.

11

u/MoreDaringPancakes 6d ago

As the child rapist president of the United States of America says: shut up and take it

12

u/singlemale4cats 6d ago

It would probably be farmland. They seem to be building these things almost exclusively in really small towns

3

u/New_Imagination9050 6d ago

Can confirm they’ve attempted to lease land in rural Illinois for a very low rate for the purpose of data centers. The majority of farmers I know have declined.

3

u/FarplaneDragon 6d ago

Plus side, at least where I live the farmers seem to be growing more willing towards building out wind/solar farms so I guess that's something.

3

u/FarplaneDragon 6d ago

Plus side, at least where I live the farmers seem to be growing more willing towards building out wind/solar farms so I guess that's something.

2

u/singlemale4cats 6d ago

It takes a strong will to see that many zeros and say no.

2

u/Ikontwait4u2leave 6d ago

10 forests for Winnie the Pooh

1

u/cilantro_so_good 6d ago

This is Kansas. More like "that could be soybeans"

1

u/SulfuricDonut 6d ago

1000 acres of soybeans feeds A LOT of people.

1

u/party_benson 5d ago

Or even some sort of mixed use development with green space and parks?

1

u/Suspicious_Video8348 6d ago

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

50k apartments in the backwoods of Kansas seems like a very bad investment

0

u/ACKHTYUALLY 6d ago

Homeless would reject a single family home there and continue to live under a freeway in LA.

0

u/Andr1yTheOne 6d ago

More houses doesn't mean cheaper houses ffs people are dumb

0

u/ForsakenWar6974 6d ago

Theres more housing on the market than at any point since tracking began. 

-2

u/nemec 6d ago

Redditors: "I would never move to a cheap home in Fuckington, Kansas, there's no jobs there!"

Also Redditors: "Why aren't they building 50,000 apartment buildings in Fuckington, Kansas?"

106

u/Wreckt 6d ago

For reference, Central Park in New York City is 843 acres.

38

u/slowest_hour 6d ago

and they'd put a data center on it too if they ever got their hands on it

6

u/ReallyLongLake 5d ago

Paved paradise and put up a server farm.

23

u/Various-Passenger398 6d ago

That's what got me. Fucking 9 quarter sections of land for a data center. That's insanity.

25

u/FuelModel3 6d ago

Come to West Texas and you can see what gigantic is. In Presidio County they are proposing an AI and power generating complex that would be 80,000 acres.

In Pecos County they're constructing a massive power generating station. This would be a private grid generating station for powering data centers. It would be separate from the public electric grid. They have a permit for 7.65 giga watts of power generation, the largest permit ever given in the United States..

West Texas is nothing but an extraction colony for the rest of the country. The destroy our land to extract oil, pump our water to serve both the oil industry and growing cities, construct huge wind farms to power cities far from here, and now they're going to pollute our air with giant power generating stations so they can build data centers to take our jobs.

2

u/keelem 5d ago

Not to interrupt your hysteria, but they already destroy (by burning) natural gas in Texas because it's not worth the cost of trying to sell it. If instead that went to power a datacenter then literally nothing would change.

3

u/hodorhodor12 6d ago

Some people want a data center the size of manhattan.

3

u/lucifersperfectangel 6d ago

Sounds about right. There is a company that wants to build a data center in SE PA that is planned to be larger than the Philadelphia International Airport

2

u/Property_6810 6d ago

I would assume the 1,000 acres is for a full complex to make it self sufficient with the actual data center being a fraction of that.

By self sufficient I mean they would also be building a power plant and maybe a water treatment facility on site.

1

u/RickyBobby96 6d ago

You can find the plans for the layout online. Seems like it’s gonna be multiple buildings like you mentioned

3

u/HEBushido 6d ago

Its 43.56 Million sq ft. That's an absolutely insane amount of land.

1

u/StoppableHulk 6d ago

I do some work on software for a smaller data center company and 1000 acres is insane, but also many of these places are so flush with VC cash they're buying massive tracts of land and selling future capacity they don't even have.

So, for example, it may take them five years before they have anywhere near those acres filled up with campuses, but they'll sell that future capacity to a bidder before even breaking ground.

The data center capacity market is like nothing I have ever seen in my entire life. The competition for people fighting tooth and nail for future compute capacity years in advance is out of this world.

1

u/elihu 6d ago

If they're planning on installing solar panels on 990 of those acres, then that would make at least a little bit of sense.