Video about AI data centers...and the effects...also contains link of where they are
= new reply since forum marked as read
Yes, there is a lot of VC money chasing the AI dream right now, just like there was in previous tech vaporware dreams ( internet build out in late 1990s, cloud computing in 2010s ). There will be winners and losers...
If you don't like AI, don't use it. It is a tool, like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil or the banal. A significant portion of internet traffic is porn. Some of the traffic is incredibly useful, some of it is social media manipulation and disinformation.
AI primary use case is a) to reduce costs ( one can then argue about loss of jobs or shifts in labor markets to new jobs ). b) to synthesize human knowledge to provide unique solutions to "intractable issues" ( note this is not creating "new" ideas, just rearranging old ideas - possibly some of them hallucinations - into a new concept). Example - chasing the dream of curing or managing cancer with therapies tailored to your disease and your DNA or coming up with a new method of creating fusion power using combinations of things tried in the past. Yes, some AI ( looking at you Palantir ) will be used to "track people in the digital prison" that this person starts ranting about... but this is not even a minor focus of AI. And, btw, they never needed AI to do it.
As for the light pollution... other than perimeter security there is zero reason for a data center to be lit up like a Christmas tree, tell them to use infrared and night vision AI to secure the facility and turn the lights off. As for the noise, there are two sources of for the noise, on site power generators running 24 x 7 and noise from the cooling solutions for the water chilled servers inside. There are solutions for both of these issues, they cost money which is why the owners of the data centers don't want to implement them.
The large data center in Utah is not going to cover 40,000 acres... they leased 40,000 acres of land and will build buildings there ( and one can argue they should not ) but they are not building a 40,000 acre building full of AI computers. First off, if the major chip makers devoted all of their AI chips for the next 20 years of production, it still would not fill single story building of 40,000 acres of servers ( using 42U 18" racks with 10 x 8 GPUs each and allowing for generous space between aisles, etc ). And, for reasons related to physics, a single story building is not optimal for an AI data center.
The VC money chasing AI will overshoot ( as is always does, yea capitalism 
) the buildout, dozens of these new data centers will consolidate or close. The economic GDP will then actually reflect the recession we are already IN which has been hidden by the AI build out and the stock market artificially positive by the large tech stocks - Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, etc when they all "come back to earth".
AI will prove useful, but not a miracle. It will ( and is ) causing disruption in job markets, but probably not as large as the industrial revolution or the information revolution before did ( how many of us are farmers now? ).
