First most of the data center build out is happening in areas that have had little other opportunity so local resistance is muted. Abilene, Texas is referenced and is the kind of place my grandfather would lovingly say is where you go to learn to be a “dirt farmer”
Second, every environmentalist in the US is fighting 100 different battles with the most anti-regulation, pro-energy administration in decades (ever?) and has limited bandwidth.
And third, the AI narrative around national security, longevity, and super-intelligence-enabled abundance provides massive national coverage - the implications being that AI will solve any environmental and or human economic disasters that they enable.
Very far from pro-energy when you give companies money to cancel energy projects that are not burning green house gases.
EDIT: I am not suggesting that they don’t build gas turbines or go off grid. I’m saying they can save fuel by using solar when it’s there.
- Data centers don’t sleep
- Data center load (for AI) could be shifted to follow the sun
- The energy requirements mean you aren’t likely to overbuild your solar farm
At night just stop running your GPUs and / or pull from the grid
Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.
I suspect their biggest problem will be water availability so they will need to use some other method for cooling.
At least a steel plant or refinery actually provides jobs for the locals. These American AI companies are just carpetbagger Yankies.
Speculation presented as fact...
There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.
Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.
Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.
Update: Since I’m being downvoted I’m going to add a little sting:
Good luck with your solar power web servers and skipping flights.
Poor judgement really does have a price. It’s now inevitable that it’s going to get a bit warmer… everywhere. We’ll be lucky to hit Net Zero by 2100.
This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.
It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.
It's so boring to relitigate this constantly on HN. It's like debating whether the sky is blue. Ridiculous that this comes up so often.
Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.
Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.
Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.
The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.
Assuming it was really environmentalists who did it, why is nuclear energy the only thing they succeeded at stopping?
Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?
Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.
Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.
Green energy is diffuse. Fields of solar. Ridges dotted with turbines. Each unit needs a power cable running away from it, access roads, etc, etc. A lot of area has to be developed for a given payback (sellable power).
Environmentalists and have been instrumental in making it economically impossible to develop land cheap enough to make low value density projects like that pencil out.
The higher power cost states in the US would likely be dotted with all manner of solar infill if not for up front costs that these shortsighted and selfish people have imposed on any land alteration larger than approx SFH lot size. Farmer Johnson would love nothing more than to put up solar on that ~2ac hillside he owns but cannot farm economically. Neither he nor some 3rd party who would put up the panels will shell out half a mil for an EPA CG permit just to clear the vegetation because the panels will never pay that back in their lives.
The economics of compliance are why the only greenfield development that happens these days is value dense commercial stuff (shopping plaza, big box store, data center, office buildings etc) or dense SFH development.
The most rosy possible outlook is that we "just" wait for the hippie boomers who cooked this crap up to croak, shit can the clean water act and come up with some new way of regulating development that doesn't saddle these super low impact projects (it's hard to be lower impact than panels or turbines) with fixed-ish costs that are a non-starter except at huge scale.
But of course there are so many parties who are making rent off this broken system who won't go down without a fight.
Right wing idiots are against solar and wind. Left wing idiots are against nuclear… leaving us with no alternative other than gas and oil!
The common denominators are “idiots” and oil.
Does that comparison mean anything to anybody?
"New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses"
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
I wouldn't be surprised if they use this as an excuse to open up public lands for extraction.
So is that a fair comparison?
I found that a 100 MW datacenter can cost roughly $3.35 billion, with a significant portion going to high-end GPUs like the B100 or H100. For electricity, 100 MW data center can incur annual power costs ranging from $41 million to over $131 million, depending on regional energy prices.
Hardware sitting idle waiting for sunshine/wind is leaving money on the table. Especially if you can burn gas during that time and still be hugely profitable.
AI data center investment is, at core, a bet on increasing the productivity of labor. That’s what businesses will pay for, and what will earn the big money.
If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate.
It’s quite impressive how the world is unable to reduce greenhouse emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Asia will do what US did in 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on July 15, 1979.
"Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-...
All while increasing natural gas prices through blockades and threats of secondary sanctions.
It will make oil billionaires (e.g., like the ones who founded the Daily Wire) very happy.
"Have the potential to", "Morocco". Presumably doesn't count the greenhouse gases emitted by Moroccans using overseas cloud services and AI.
At least the example wasn't Vatican City.
More productivity means the employers just demand more from the workers
No, you'll work 40 hours and just do 10 times more in that time. Same thing.
It generally is called "effective altruism", eg, techno jesus will solve whatever problems creating techno jesus creates.
I can promise you it won't happen in a million years. More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work.. Or at least we have decades of data proving that is what realistically happen. So the only way to reduce emissions is either using carbon neutral sources (gas is... not?) or forbidding people from using energy in the first place (and let's be honest, that will not happen.)
That is a tough sell in the current environment. It's a regressive tax, so opposed on both ends of the political spectrum. People on the far right don't believe in climate change, and people on the far left don't believe in market efficiency. With 20% of the world's oil flow crimped in the Strait of Hormuz for who knows how long, higher energy prices is the last thing people want to contemplate.
In the longer run, a carbon tax is the best option. The fossil fuel price shock is a strong signal to produce energy through other means. There are major engineering initiatives around developing cheaper and safer nuclear energy. and it's cheaper now to deploy a solar farm than a coal plant.
A carbon tax would raise money to pay off national debts and encourage consumers and producers to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish their needs while minimizing their carbon footprint. It's a tough sell today, but this is they way to go for a better quality of life tomorrow.
But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
Carbon intensity is not the relevant metric.
And there's no evidence or historic precedent backing your idea that it would go down anyway.
https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/11/data-centers-at-risk-th...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/opinion/elect...
Although renewables are on the rise in use, huge projects have recently been cancelled in favor for gas. Meanwhile the us is going around blowing up and encouraging other gas producing nations to blow up gas infrastructure.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5851702-trump-...
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2026/04/...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/15/how-successful-is-...
It's only doom if we willfully do nothing to make it better or ignore it until it becomes a problem we can no longer fix.
https://sustainabilitydialogue.uchicago.edu/news/data-center...
You ever lose power and run a generator? The stink and sound is awful. Imagine powering more houses than there are in a suburban town with gas? Imagine doing that in hundreds of thousands of locations across the us. It's a dystopian thought.
I agree it is hard to stand up an effective grid to sustain technological innovations and products. It sounds like something we needed to be ready for like other countries are. Or maybe something that should happen first in order to be responsible and get ready for the future.
they are not providing me a vehichle that is as good and as convenient as my 12yo diesel station wagon. if 8 years ago - when i bought it - it cost 90% of my then income, the same model/trim now costs 110% of my current yearly income. Consider that in the meantime i've doubled my income.
For the same reason, the equivalent EV is completely out of the question, but i'd rather get an hybrid.
Even at current diesel prices i see no reason to get in debt to change a perfectly good car that has at least 100k to 150k km left to give.
Make simillar reasoning for switching heating from natural gas to heat pumps. Most houses in my area are not insulated for it, nor the climate is well suited, material and electricity cost too much to recoup the investment without heavy subsidies (and you pay for them indirectly anyway)
And in the end, judging by our energy mix, electricity would be generated by petrol and natural gas so what's the point. A bit more efficiency for my extreme inconvenience?
I'd rather have them build some nuke reactors, that will really make a difference.
We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc.
The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
China is still building large amount of new coal power plants. In 2025, construction began on 83GW of new coal capacity – down from 98GW in 2024.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/rush-for-new-coal-in-china-hits-...
For comparision the total EU’s existing coal fleet is 109 GW.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/coal-is-not-making-...
The growth Chinas coal consumption is slowing down, but still growth no reduction in 2026.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Coal has many uses in China in comparison with US
https://www.iea.org/countries/china/coal
https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/coal
For example China has strongly expanded in making liquid fuels from coal.
"China consumes about 380 million metric tons of coal as a feedstock for chemical and liquid fuel production, representing about 8% of the country’s total coal consumption of 4,939 million metric tons."
The amount of coal that China uses only as a feedstock for chemical and liquid fuel production is bigger than total coal consumption in Europe or total coal consumption in US.
https://thecoalhub.com/china-consumes-almost-400-mt-of-coal-...
https://asiatimes.com/2025/07/chinas-climate-gambit-bet-on-c...
Radiant with their modular reactors seems to be doing quite well.
Also, it was a very high priority for France - keep in mind Napoleon's quote about the relative importance of moral and material.
More critically: The logic of "The French did {extremely complex thing} fairly well in the late 1900's, therefore we can also" is very similar to the logic of "SpaceX designs and operates reusable rockets with hundreds of launches per year and no failures, therefore we can also". NO, sorry, you are just fantasizing about rocket science somehow being easy for you. SpaceX has lots of highly motivated would-be competitors - many of them far better financed than SpaceX was - but the hard fact is that zero of those can actually do what SpaceX is doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
The costs were not small, but probably smaller than the costs of German Energiewende. Messmer plan needed not only money, but also capable heavy industry and consistent political support.
https://theinnovationattorney.substack.com/p/the-messmer-pla...
https://carboncredits.com/nuclear-education-how-germany-lost...
Had France have such rich coal reserves as Germany, they would probably build coal power plants instead of nuclear power plants.
Germany 39022 millions short tons
France 176 millions short tons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_rese...
Only by the deceptive accounting trick of not including the emissions associated with overseas production of the goods consumed by the "developed world".
If you include all the emissions that prop up the highest per capita consumption patterns on the planet then you see the highest per capita emissions attached to the highest consumers.
That does increase US's emissions, but not enough to change the conclusion:
Yeah it's far better to have power plants kill a steady stream of people, but in a banal way that's hard to attribute, like coal power plants causing lung cancer.
So build your data centers there. No reason to choose the least evil.
Wind and solar with storage is far better than nuclear.
And, yes, every country should have nuclear power and nuclear deterrence. Please contrast how the US negotiated with North Korea and Libya. Or what happened to Ukraine after they denuclearized. You might be impressed at how palatable peace becomes when leadership has to consider their personal safety and not just cynical economic and political calculus in their use of force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances."
Many nuclear energy opponents require absolute nuclear proliferation safety.
It's pretty heavily fossil-fuel powered right now, but like most of the rest of the world Morocco is planning to capture most of its growth in energy demand with renewables. Because, getting back to the original discussion, it'd be idiotic to choose fossil fuels over renewables in 2026.
Renewables also seem to be the best pathway for many nations to attain some level of energy independence (which is NOT the same as oil independence though).
When used as the sole source of electricity solar clocks at 565 EUR/MWh. Nuclear, for comparison, is at 141 EUR/MWh.
A MWh of solar is about 30 Euro/MWh if you levelize the capital costs.
A large battery storage site is about 500MWh.
So this is totally doable and it’s also going to be economical as soon as the US has built enough LNG export capacity.
https://constructionreviewonline.com/top-5-largest-data-cent...
I think that's a fair point, I underestimated the power needs.
For a 1GW data center, the economical case is probably to build about 2 GWp of solar, plus a 5GWh battery or so.
That is not unrealistic:
https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/masdar-and-consortium-par...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/28/catl-secures-worlds-l...
On a sunny day, that will let you to power the data center fully from solar for most of the day, and partially through the night.
Obviously you need ~1GW of gas turbine capacity as well, for the non-so-sunny-days, so the economic case for solar here is dependent on the fuel price.
Either way, in winter you’ll need the gas turbines, I didn’t claim otherwise.
There isn't a single battery this big today, but if batteries continue following the exponential growth curve they've been on then there probably will be in the next decade or so (if not sooner).
- The ratio between "some water" and "the pacific ocean" is a lot higher than 5
- On an exponential growth curve, a factor of 5 isn't all that much.
This probably isn't feasible for a data center being built today (although they could build solar to at least reduce their fossil fuel power generation needs during the day). But it probably will be for data centers being built in 5-10 years time.
Basically it's important to differentiate between "we can't quite do this yet" and "we'll likely never be able to do this". And powering a data center with rewnewables+batteries is definitely in the former category.
> Nobody is suggesting to use solar as the sole source of electricity.
You weren't clear on what you propose.
Germany has a lot of solar. It's suppressing prices below the electricity price you would get with pure gas power generation.
There are reasons it might not work, not least of all political. But a link to a paper picking a bone with LCoE is talking past GP.
Exempli gratia: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-household-powe...
And the proposal to fix this is more accounting games to transfer costs to different constituents.