Data centers news and discussion

[weatheriscool]

[caltrek]

Data Center Accidentally Wastes 3 Million Gallons of Water in Drought-Stricken State
By Ryan Grenoble
August 31, 2026

Introduction:

(Huffington Post) President Donald Trump on Monday urged Americans to build data centers unless “they want to end up being backwards and poor,” referring to the energy-hungry, water-cooled facilities as a “Golden Goose.”

In related news, officials in El Reno, Okla., say a damaged private water line at a data center there wasted more than 3 million gallons of water before it was discovered late last week. According to KOCO News, the business in question specializes in AI storage and Bitcoin mining.

The leak forced El Reno schools and the county courthouse to temporarily close, and forced thousands of residents to go without water, KFOR reported, after levels in El Reno’s water towers unexpectedly plummeted.

“The last 24 plus hours was a very stressful time,” El Reno Interim City Manager Ken Brown told KOCO.

Some 100% of Oklahoma is in a drought right now, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, with 40% of the western part of the state experiencing either “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, the driest of four categories.

Read more here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/o ... c2&ei=64

[caltrek]

Data Center Backlash Is Preventing Cities from Learning How to Handle Them
By Abi Olvera
August 26, 2026

Introduction:

(Bulletin of Atomic Scientitsts) Data centers are at the heart of one of the most contentious infrastructure debates in the country. In June, OpenAI and Oracle broke ground in Saline Township, Michigan for the largest data center in the state, drawing both praise and criticism. Since then, many others including Sabey Data Centers’ Umatilla Campus in Oregon and NVIDIA’s AI Factory in Fort Worth, Texas also began work.

No state has more experience with these structures than Virginia, which according to one estimate hosts roughly a quarter of hyperscale data centers in the United States. Virginia built these over the past two decades, helped by its place at the crossroads of the country’s fiber-optic networks and reliable power. A stretch of Loudoun County in northern Virginia called “Data Center Alley” carries so much traffic that industry groups estimate 70 percent of the world’s internet IP traffic passes through it.

To attract the industry, Virginia exempts data centers from sales tax on the computers, servers, and other equipment used to outfit their facilities. That exemption costs roughly $1.6 billion annually in tax the state would otherwise collect. A legislative review found that through extra economic activity, the state government of Virginia recovers only 48 cents for every dollar it gives up. But although the state loses money, Loudoun County receives data center revenue through its personal property tax on computer equipment housed inside data centers. Now, Loudoun County funds 38 percent of its general budget from data center revenue, enough to cut property tax rates to the lowest in the state. In other words, the same facility that costs the state money is a financial windfall for the county.

Officials who have navigated such complexities are unwilling to talk about them or share notes with others. They are absorbing backlash from residents angry about noise, new power lines, rising electricity bills, and the sense that tech companies have too much say over local land. The result is a self-defeating information gap: local governments negotiating their first deals lack access to experienced people to ask for advice at a moment when at least 140 new projects are planned nationwide.

Read more here: https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/data-c ... heading

[firestar464]

not even Republicans want this shit lmao

[Cyber_Rebel]

@firestar

Not agreeing with the WSJ is not a reason to report it or consider it an unviable source for citation. I actually do agree that there's quite a lot of misinformation out there about data centers regarding their impact on the environment; which is to say they aren't nearly as hyperbolically terrible for the environment as some claim.

The data center debate is similar in some sense to the nuclear one, which I also found foolish for the left to be against in the first place.