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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
With the massive buildout of data centers has come an equally massive backlash. They’ve been blamed for higher electricity bills, taking up too much water, and pushing out farmland. All this has led to a public outcry and efforts against their construction.
But how much of the criticism is warranted? Has one of America’s fastest-growing industries become a political scapegoat?
Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Andy Masley, an independent writer supported by Coefficient Giving who deep dives into AI research. Recently, he has focused on data centers at his great newsletter and separating facts from myths surrounding them.
We discuss what the evidence actually says about data centers’ impact on water, land, and electricity prices—and where Andy thinks people get the facts wrong. We also discuss AI art, Waymo, and America’s willingness to embrace technological change.
In This Episode:
* AI Art as Curation (0:37)
* Waymo and Technological Disruption (4:43)
* The Case for Data Centers (9:14)
* Water and Land (15:41)
* Data Centers and Electricity (21:41)
* The Data Center Backlash (28:50)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But here are some edited highlights from the chat:
On AI Art…
As you see someone using Midjourney to create images that you are actually much more interested in, and find more subtle or pleasant than the kinds of AI-generated images most people are typically exposed to on their timelines, it can really open people up and make them realize that these tools are much more powerful than they might expect.
On Waymo Entering Cities…
While there are many industries that I might worry about completely disrupting, the number of deaths caused by driving, and the difficulty people face getting around very dense cities, are such important problems that I am willing to hand the robots this one before we march forward elsewhere. On this issue, I am entirely gung ho: “Let the Waymos have it.”
On misconceptions about data centers…
If you somehow hid the words “data center” but included all the other information and asked, “Would you accept these specific trade-offs in your community, such as using a certain amount of water and land, in exchange for this amount of tax revenue?” I think that, in most places, with a few exceptions, people would say yes.
On the “lack” of land…
This has really blown up in the past few months in a way I really didn’t expect. Willie Nelson actually just posted this thing that got like a hundred thousand likes on Twitter about, “Don’t give them an inch of our farmland.” My basic finding is that data centers themselves, the physical buildings, will take up something like one-fifteenth of the land that we currently dedicate to Christmas trees in America, which isn’t nothing, but it’s also incredibly small.
On data centers driving up electricity prices…
Electricity markets are very complicated and don’t always work in a simple, you increase demand, and the price just immediately goes up for everyone. That’s not really how it works. They have had to slightly raise household electricity prices because of the data center. They’ve reported data centers as being one of several causes, but that’s usually not a significant percentage.
On the growing data center backlash
It’s hard not to feel like a lot of the anti-data center stuff is also this collective, “I can find this deep meaning in this local struggle against these people who I perceive to be bad.” The general idea that we can all band together as this ragtag team of everyday people and prevent this thing from destroying our local community is a very compelling narrative to people, regardless of the actual specific harms that are expected. I do think general anti-tech sentiment is definitely playing into this.
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