I still don’t get it, they seem to be springing up everywhere. The only attraction for this one seems to be that the company will pay a lot in water bills, but disadvantage the residents.
It’s the tulip bubble of our day, I suspect.
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I don’t know a lot about this, but the reason for all these data centres seems to be to support AI? Which I think will turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Meanwhile they’ve destroyed vast tracts of countryside and created hardly any jobs.
Let’s hope it does turn out to be a bubble that bursts before AI can start harming humans in worse ways than it does now.
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Except in the Scandanavian countries where planning controls mean the waste heat from data centres must be used for district heating of thousands of homes. Now why can’t our stupid little island have someone smart enough to insist on the same?
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I didn’t know about that, sounds like a very good idea.
From countries that are much greener than most others. Love their mindset, especially their oil which they decided to keep the profits and its apparently put a value of 1/4 million on each person. Much better than a few shareholders. I loved Sweden when I was working over there but its too cold and on a british income / pension unafordable.
Why so many? There’s money to be made.
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And costs to the environment to be born by others.
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There’s 750 billion dollars been committed to building data centres and general AI infrastructure this year. The only reason Trump hasn’t managed to kill the economy is the huge inflow of money into AI which is propping markets up more than anyone would like to admit
There’s serious plans for data centres in space …
It won’t go away - hints are there’s years of it to come (then quantum arrives and they do it again). There’s a huge attempt to dominate (own) the market by Amazon Google and Microsoft especially hence invest hard now and no ones going to be able to challenge you.
Sod the environmental issues, the cost of computer memory and storage has gone through the roof just as I was about to build something to replace my ancient gaming PC!
So dimm 
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Privatise the profits and socialise the costs. It’s the American Way ™
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And who do you think taught them that lesson?
Cory Doctorow has some interesting thoughts on AI…
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I’m so bored of none of these advertised apocalyptic events actually coming to pass.
The simple answer to the original question is that data centres are required to cope with for the general increase in the need to store data. AI is not the the biggest driver.
For instance we all happily take photos of everything & anything & expect that to be stored safely so we can access it at any moment from multiple devices. We then send or share pictures of our cats/dogs/ loved ones/garden produce/cars/ etc. to our friends or the world at large. All that takes up storage space somewhere, somehow.
Unless we’re going to reverse the benefits of being in a connected world then there will always be a need for data storage. Yes, such data centres should be made to operate efficiently & beneficially, but objecting to them as a matter of principle via the actual internet is as ironic as it is hypocritical.
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Store locally not in the cloud.
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All those photos people take of their food, I really don’t understand this very annoying habit, the photo has to be stored somewhere? Plus all the frivolous uses of your AI, stored in data centres.
Environmentally speaking , they are an absolute disaster. I did write to the Sec of State for energy some years ago to ask about how the environmental impact was going to be mitigated, and was fobbed off with a response that indicated they hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. I posed the same question fairly recently and was given a response which demonstrated this was an issue now being looked at. But I’m still not convinced by the response.
AI seems to be the excuse for the governments and local authorities to pass through the large number of data centre builds in progress / being applied for. In reality there will be a boom and a bit of a bust and I see the future having some of them quite empty or mothballed. The challenge is how to power them and indeed in the UK recently there have been a few investments pulled due to the very high cost of the energy needed to power these monster data centres and also the actual connections to the grid being available.
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Also they use a lot of water apparently not just electricity.