Most of the issues with datacenters could be solved by a) investing in energy b) ramping up RAM and chip production, and c) enforcing already long established rules around industrial water management.
These tech companies are already investing heavily into solar, natural gas, and nuclear https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he... this would be normal stuff in China where they spend the last decade investing heavily in solar and are bringing something like 60 nuclear reactors online.
These datacenters aren't particularly consumptive of water compared to most other industries in that regard and we've already seen states enforce rules against Meta who immediately paused their datacenter when water issues were detected (following mandatory monitoring).
Chip production is lagging but most projections I've seen is it will normalize in about 5yrs. Not to mention there will be further demand for robotics and self driving cars, so ramping up chips should be a normal thing like ramping up green/nuclear energy. Delaying it won't solve any current issues.
These developments are always facing local resistance. I previously lived in a place where they were building a quarry 30min outside of town and tons of houses had anti-quarry signs on their lawns. It was a big deal to appear anti-quarry even though it had little to do with their neighbourhood specifically (except maybe increased highway trucking traffic).
Most industrial development face local protests like this and it's often has large crossover with those NIMBY who resist stuff like housing developments, and show up at town/city councils.
All news is influenced by what’s popular social media these days. And that becomes part of what people talk about through the grapevine.
But no doubt there’s plenty of organic NIMBYism, anti tech growth stuff, and run of the mill fear of change and loss of control as society grows more abstract/centralized.
NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media.
Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
I have a friend who lives 1.5hrs outside Toronto and needs Starlink because ISPs don’t offer anything useful. Same with a family member with a house even closer to Toronto. These aren’t far off North Ontario rural houses and there’s tons of people living up there.
All journalism is terrible these days. They just want a catchy headline for the ad view and nothing else matters, including whether the headline is true or not.
I recently set up Posthog in production on 3 apps and Posthog's MCP and integrated AI chat were very helpful for onboarding (verifying integrations, setting up and recommending dashboards, debugging an event not being tracked properly, etc).
I stopped updating CLAUDE.md because I felt like Claude always ignored it. But over time I noticed there is still times (especially during planning and review) where it's good to maintain the official document as a reference. As opposed to memory.md or manual edits.
This market is far from mature or established to be making rankings. There's been plenty of tech markets where the early days didn't predict the later years.
I'm personally skeptical of Grok but maybe they can pull off a profitable niche with Cursor integration once Claude loses it's edge.
Cursor has had a good AI product tons of people used for real work for 2yrs (up until recently when the Claude gap widened significantly) while Microsoft/Github has just been pretending they do with Copilot and awful Github AI integrations nobody likes. Meanwhile Github's code has already been vacuumed up by all the models by now.
Tax payers are already responsible for the fees paid to cancel the contract early, but won't tell the public how much it cost. They also already paid for a test run with a first nations community in 2020 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/spacex-deal-ontario-s...
I personally see more value in connecting poor and isolated rural communities. Plus I highly doubt a provincial government contract in Canada will be a major influence on a Elon's dumb twitter politics.
Ontario ended a $100M contract with Starlink to help connect 15k rural and first nations households because Elon was connected with the US administration when tariffs were announced
The goal at this stage is largely training data collection so it can reach widescale use. Just like self driving variations in multiple different cities, the data needed for AI robotics is broad with a million niche usecases, so it makes sense it's not strictly commercial.
They need visual recording of tele-operated robots (or humans with headset cameras) doing normal household stuff like folding laundry in real environments so it can be fully automated. Which is what funds a lot of this stuff since that training data is a goldmine right now if a company can collect enough of it.
This is assuming the whole "AI safety" thing was anything more than Silicon Valley kool aid. The government just bought into the marketing and radical safety woo woo wholesale and panicked.
You could legitimately argue this is a unique situation, a brief window where cybersecurity is being disrupted by new harnesses + a strong model. But that will be fleeting as other models and products adapt very quickly, and the long term benefits of keeping it from the market are questionable at best.
It's not a coincidence the export control was dropped after Dario (who is a hardcore AI safety activist much like Ilya Sutskever) was replaced by Tom Brown in the government negotiations.
> Meta kicked off the year with a 200-megawatt solar deal with multinational electric utility Engie. The purchase went toward a solar farm near one of the company’s existing data centers in Texas. At the time of the deal, Meta already had over 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in its renewable portfolio.
> Stargate AI partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group was reported by Bloomberg to be powered, at least in part, by solar. SB Energy, which is part of SoftBank’s portfolio, is expected to develop solar installations backed by grid-scale batteries.
> Meta closed out the month with another massive solar deal, this one with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra. The contract was for 595 megawatts of capacity.
> Meta continued its streak in February, investing in a 505-megawatt solar project with Cypress Creek Renewables, which is developing the massive installation in Coleman County, Texas — about 150 miles northwest of Austin.
> Microsoft entered the fray in February, too. The company has long been a buyer of renewable energy to power its operations, and added another 389 megawatts of solar in a deal with EDP Renewables North America.
> Amazon also made a big purchase, backing a hybrid project on the Iberian Peninsula that includes wind, solar, and pumped-hydroelectric storage. The deal included 476 megawatts total, of which 212 megawatts are solar.
> Outside of the U.S., data center operators have also been investing in solar. In India, CtrlS built its own 125-megawatt facility in two phases, the first half of which was finished in June 2024 with the second completed in early February. In South America, Telecom Argentina agreed to buy electricity from a 130-megawatt solar farm developed by MSU Green Energy.
> Microsoft added another three solar developments in March, again focusing on the Midwest. The projects span Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri, and they’re being developed by AES. Together, they will provide Microsoft with 475 megawatts of capacity, adding to its considerable 34-gigawatt portfolio.
> Cisco got in the game with a 100-megawatt deal with X-Elio, a solar developer owned by Brookfield, an asset manager that has bet big on renewables. The power purchase agreements see Cisco buying capacity from two different Texas solar projects.
> Meta added another 200 megawatts of solar to its portfolio in March in a deal with RWE. The solar farm will be built just southeast of Austin.
> In Italy, data center operator Data4 signed a 10-year deal with utility Edison Energia to buy power from a 148-megawatt solar farm northwest of Rome.
That was all in 2025^
There's also been big investment in nuclear and natural gas
This is a popular social media take that is being pushed very hard by clickbait and doomposters, so it's not exactly going against the tide.
Social media is always trying to make things sound way worse than they are and journalists are always in a rush to latch onto those trending keywords, and artificially spin headlines vaguely connected to the topic. So if you only skim headlines it's easy to think something is a bigger problem than it is.
These tech companies are already investing heavily into solar, natural gas, and nuclear https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he... this would be normal stuff in China where they spend the last decade investing heavily in solar and are bringing something like 60 nuclear reactors online.
These datacenters aren't particularly consumptive of water compared to most other industries in that regard and we've already seen states enforce rules against Meta who immediately paused their datacenter when water issues were detected (following mandatory monitoring).
Chip production is lagging but most projections I've seen is it will normalize in about 5yrs. Not to mention there will be further demand for robotics and self driving cars, so ramping up chips should be a normal thing like ramping up green/nuclear energy. Delaying it won't solve any current issues.