A data center on a ship out in the ocean is orders of magnitude cheaper and orders of magnitude more capable. If we can't demonstrate a solution to the heat problem, in-orbit DCs that contribute meaningful compute are a fantasy and nothing more.
I choose to accept reality. Until someone can do it, it hasn’t been done. Once that happens, this will cease being vaporware. The bubble is filled with vapors and those who drank the koolaide can’t seem to get themselves to accept.
You don't in fact have viable solutions to this problem when orbital launch prices are above like 100USD per ton, probably needs to be closer to 20USD per ton.
It still doesn't make any sense: if they're not going to use bodies of water to cool them in space, they can not use a body of water to cool them in the middle of nowhere. The same with the solar panels
No they aren't because it was never about the externalities of the data center itself (for most - it was for a few people who actually were screwed by the noise, for example). Instead, it's because most of this crowd is anti-AI luddites who hate that change is happening too fast for their minds to comprehend or adapt to.
They stand in the way of a nearly limitless number of positive outcomes from this technology and directly have blood on their hands that they wipe away with thought terminating cliches like "precautionary principle"
Or look at it this way, a massive change has been forced on the public through the decisions of a small number of people. Basically the whole "Accept your fate, it is inevitable" backfired spectacularly. The people were robbed of their agency, their democratic process. This is just the democratic will reasserting its agency.
The new poll found that 41 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of where they live, up from 28 percent in the January survey. The number supporting those projects dropped during the same period, from 37 percent to 24 percent.
The shift was especially pronounced among people who said they had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race.
The results reflect the scope of the challenge facing the industry and its supporters as the rapid buildout of data centers brings the issue home to voters ahead of the November midterms. More than 200 data centers are going up in dozens of competitive House districts, a recent POLITICO analysis found.
“It’s rare to see political attitudes change this fast in an era where they are often quite static and partisan,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First.
Not surprising at all. There is paid for the locals when these things appear, but they don’t get anything back for that paid. Even if they’re computer literate and using ai, there’s no notice that this came from their local centre. Nor is there anything that’s unique to a particular location.
People get annoyed at being inconvenienced so that others, elsewhere can make money.
Here in Michigan there are large industrial facilities that most locals have no idea what is done inside. There's noise, electric usage, trucks coming in and out, but most people think it's ok. Data centers are seen differently.
It’s different because those places typically provide jobs for the people in the surrounding area. Data centers don’t employ enough people to provide an economic benefit for the people that live near them.
This could have been stopped so easily on its tracks with a simple premise: 1 day turnaround build permits, to any proposed off-the-grid data centers.
BYO power. BYO water. BYO pipes & sewage. OK, you are good. Now build!
Instead they are look like parasites invading the heartland and sucking resources (true or not), and owners pretend to be surprised when they are getting voted down.
> 1 day turnaround build permits, to any proposed off-the-grid data centers.
Utility planning is one tiny part of approving a building permit. You still need to look at storm water runoff, fire safety, environmental impact etc…
I’m also not even sure what bring your own water even looks like.
And even if they are providing their own wastewater treatment, that requires an even closer look than hooking up to municipal sewage. It also requires at least occasional long term inspection because these kinds of systems fail at insanely high rates.
Data centers would be less contentious in the U.S. if energy was plentiful and clean. As it is, it externalizes costs onto the public and strains profit-optimized electrical grids while contributing to local pollution and global warming.
The question isn't whether that's true, the question is the magnitude of the effect.
By all accounts, it's completely blown out of proportion. If people genuinely, actually care about energy costs, they can vocally support when calls for setting your thermostat at 78F in summertime go out.
The same demographic is against building new power plants, especially in their vicinity. There could have been abundant power if Nixon‘s plan to build out nuclear had been allowed to proceed.
As a hardcore progressive/georgist but also hardcore pro-AI "singularity is near and it's good" transhumanist, I can already tell that I am about to be politically disenfranchised and likely won't be able to vote for a democratic (specifically DSA) candidate again.
Not because of the "socialism" per-se, but because I have to watch as the very same crowd who 20 years ago was celebrating piracy and copyright abolitionism cozy up to the very copyright trolls they claimed to hate, all because they see their own poorly paid/exploitive creative jobs being automated away.
I get gell-mann amnesia'd by statements that Bernie, AoC, Warren et al say about AI/Tech on a weekly basis.
It's insane that the very technology that could viable implement something approaching "actual socialism" is scapegoated, villified, etc. I unironically believe that Chinese labs continuing to open source their models is being done because the CEOs believe that it's unironically part of the "actual communism" way of doing AI.
Why don't I see the anarchist/left-wing crowd protesting for OpenAI/Anthropic to release/open-weights their models? That's what you should be doing, and if you don't and instead deploy the same rhetoric to go full butlerian jihad, I know your movement is intellectually bankrupt, disingenuous, and ontologically evil.
There's a massive difference between piracy/copyright at a small scale for personal use or creative purposes and the wealthiest companies in the world devouring copyrighted materials and then selling it back to us.
Actually both fit into the same category of "defending individuals from massive conglomerates". Either being sued into oblivion for sharing content or having your personal IP ripped off by companies with enough lawyers for them to get away with it.
Protections for individuals, restrictions on big business. Seems to align greatly with the modern socialist M.O.
You ignored my part about how all socialists should call for the immediate open-sourcing of all closed models.
Standing in the way of mass proliferation and dissemination of this technology is about as anti-socialist as it gets. Gatekeepers deserve no room for justification.
Socialism is about making the government work for people and protecting individuals from corporate greed.
If using AI (open source or otherwise) is going to require stealing water from or increasing energy demand on already stretched communities then AI isn't worth it.
No AI until it serves everyone equally and without sacrifices.
Are folks still thinking orbital data centers are an impossibility? Because this is a strong part of the motivation for those.
A data center on a ship out in the ocean is orders of magnitude cheaper and orders of magnitude more capable. If we can't demonstrate a solution to the heat problem, in-orbit DCs that contribute meaningful compute are a fantasy and nothing more.
Solar power in space is potentially very cheap; solar on a ship is not.
The heat problem has demonstrable solutions that people who are physics challenged can't seem to get themselves to accept.
> Solar power in space is potentially very cheap
Only if you ignore the cost of getting in there
What's the solution to the heat problem?
I choose to accept reality. Until someone can do it, it hasn’t been done. Once that happens, this will cease being vaporware. The bubble is filled with vapors and those who drank the koolaide can’t seem to get themselves to accept.
You think the heat problem has solutions in space? Good luck! Unfortunately this is a harsh mistress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_cooling
You don't in fact have viable solutions to this problem when orbital launch prices are above like 100USD per ton, probably needs to be closer to 20USD per ton.
Anyone reading between the lines understands datacenter deployment has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with kneecapping AI development.
If datacenters in space become a thing, you'll hear your neighbor talking about how rockets poison the air.
It still doesn't make any sense: if they're not going to use bodies of water to cool them in space, they can not use a body of water to cool them in the middle of nowhere. The same with the solar panels
Not impossible but I'm still curious how they're planning to deal with heat.
I'd also wonder if the folks who don't want to live within 3 miles of a data center are OK with the data center flying over their head
No they aren't because it was never about the externalities of the data center itself (for most - it was for a few people who actually were screwed by the noise, for example). Instead, it's because most of this crowd is anti-AI luddites who hate that change is happening too fast for their minds to comprehend or adapt to.
They stand in the way of a nearly limitless number of positive outcomes from this technology and directly have blood on their hands that they wipe away with thought terminating cliches like "precautionary principle"
Or look at it this way, a massive change has been forced on the public through the decisions of a small number of people. Basically the whole "Accept your fate, it is inevitable" backfired spectacularly. The people were robbed of their agency, their democratic process. This is just the democratic will reasserting its agency.
The modern version of democratic will is a sudden need to ban everything because you saw some outrage articles on social media.
The motivation for this idea is to inflate the price of SPCX.
The new poll found that 41 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of where they live, up from 28 percent in the January survey. The number supporting those projects dropped during the same period, from 37 percent to 24 percent.
The shift was especially pronounced among people who said they had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race.
The results reflect the scope of the challenge facing the industry and its supporters as the rapid buildout of data centers brings the issue home to voters ahead of the November midterms. More than 200 data centers are going up in dozens of competitive House districts, a recent POLITICO analysis found.
“It’s rare to see political attitudes change this fast in an era where they are often quite static and partisan,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First.
Not surprising at all. There is paid for the locals when these things appear, but they don’t get anything back for that paid. Even if they’re computer literate and using ai, there’s no notice that this came from their local centre. Nor is there anything that’s unique to a particular location.
People get annoyed at being inconvenienced so that others, elsewhere can make money.
Usually the states give the incentives, the local towns usually get their tax revenue doubled or tripled, hence why these boards sprint to approval
Here in Michigan there are large industrial facilities that most locals have no idea what is done inside. There's noise, electric usage, trucks coming in and out, but most people think it's ok. Data centers are seen differently.
"but most people think it's ok."
How would you know what "most people" think? Broad generalizations and opinion stated as fact.
It’s different because those places typically provide jobs for the people in the surrounding area. Data centers don’t employ enough people to provide an economic benefit for the people that live near them.
>It’s rare to see political attitudes change this fast
On the contrary - these mass political crazes are like flash-floods these days.
This is not your standard partisan issue.
What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026 - https://www.wired.com/story/how-data-centers-broke-american-...
Data center approvals in Texas halted until audits completed, Gov. Greg Abbott says - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-pr...
DeSantis lambastes White House over possibility of blocking state-level AI laws - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/4605403...
New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium - https://www.reuters.com/world/new-york-becomes-first-state-i...
Libertarian Ohio governor candidate calls for ‘immediate moratorium’ on new data centers -https://www.cleveland.com/news/2026/08/ohio-governor-candida...
Oregonians want data center moratorium and no more tax breaks, poll finds - https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/08/oregonians...
Virginia state senators call for data center moratorium - https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/v...
Tucker Carlson, Kevin O’Leary have testy exchange over Utah data center issues - https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-kevin-oleary-...
"Tucker Carlson, Kevin O’Leary"
A real meeting of the minds.
This could have been stopped so easily on its tracks with a simple premise: 1 day turnaround build permits, to any proposed off-the-grid data centers.
BYO power. BYO water. BYO pipes & sewage. OK, you are good. Now build!
Instead they are look like parasites invading the heartland and sucking resources (true or not), and owners pretend to be surprised when they are getting voted down.
> 1 day turnaround build permits, to any proposed off-the-grid data centers.
Utility planning is one tiny part of approving a building permit. You still need to look at storm water runoff, fire safety, environmental impact etc…
I’m also not even sure what bring your own water even looks like.
And even if they are providing their own wastewater treatment, that requires an even closer look than hooking up to municipal sewage. It also requires at least occasional long term inspection because these kinds of systems fail at insanely high rates.
> BYO power
Like 26 gas turbines that make a ton of noise and pollution?
> BYO water
What? How does one BYO water?
> BYO pipes & sewage
Pipes and sewage to where? There's an implied common ground at the end of those.
This does not bode well for American prosperity. This is going the way of Europe, complacent and non-competitive. The future belongs to China.
Data centers would be less contentious in the U.S. if energy was plentiful and clean. As it is, it externalizes costs onto the public and strains profit-optimized electrical grids while contributing to local pollution and global warming.
The question isn't whether that's true, the question is the magnitude of the effect.
By all accounts, it's completely blown out of proportion. If people genuinely, actually care about energy costs, they can vocally support when calls for setting your thermostat at 78F in summertime go out.
The same demographic is against building new power plants, especially in their vicinity. There could have been abundant power if Nixon‘s plan to build out nuclear had been allowed to proceed.
Now China does it.
Yeah, but how badly did Silicon Valley fuck this up to unite Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon in a common crusade?
it seems to me like we care about absolutely anything other than the one really important thing right now
As a hardcore progressive/georgist but also hardcore pro-AI "singularity is near and it's good" transhumanist, I can already tell that I am about to be politically disenfranchised and likely won't be able to vote for a democratic (specifically DSA) candidate again.
Not because of the "socialism" per-se, but because I have to watch as the very same crowd who 20 years ago was celebrating piracy and copyright abolitionism cozy up to the very copyright trolls they claimed to hate, all because they see their own poorly paid/exploitive creative jobs being automated away.
I get gell-mann amnesia'd by statements that Bernie, AoC, Warren et al say about AI/Tech on a weekly basis.
It's insane that the very technology that could viable implement something approaching "actual socialism" is scapegoated, villified, etc. I unironically believe that Chinese labs continuing to open source their models is being done because the CEOs believe that it's unironically part of the "actual communism" way of doing AI.
Why don't I see the anarchist/left-wing crowd protesting for OpenAI/Anthropic to release/open-weights their models? That's what you should be doing, and if you don't and instead deploy the same rhetoric to go full butlerian jihad, I know your movement is intellectually bankrupt, disingenuous, and ontologically evil.
There's a massive difference between piracy/copyright at a small scale for personal use or creative purposes and the wealthiest companies in the world devouring copyrighted materials and then selling it back to us.
Actually both fit into the same category of "defending individuals from massive conglomerates". Either being sued into oblivion for sharing content or having your personal IP ripped off by companies with enough lawyers for them to get away with it.
Protections for individuals, restrictions on big business. Seems to align greatly with the modern socialist M.O.
This is why modern socialism is bankrupt.
It does NOT change with scale.
You ignored my part about how all socialists should call for the immediate open-sourcing of all closed models.
Standing in the way of mass proliferation and dissemination of this technology is about as anti-socialist as it gets. Gatekeepers deserve no room for justification.
Socialism is about making the government work for people and protecting individuals from corporate greed.
If using AI (open source or otherwise) is going to require stealing water from or increasing energy demand on already stretched communities then AI isn't worth it.
No AI until it serves everyone equally and without sacrifices.
To me that's a more consistent stance than yours.