Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity–and the Backlash Has Begun

https://singularityhub.com/2026/05/22/data-centers-now-consume-6-of-electricity-in-the-us-and-the-backlash-has-begun/

by cdrnsf • 2 months ago

66 22 2 months ago

singularityhub.com

freakynit2• 2 months ago

The Coming ‘Power Wars’ Between Humans and Datacenters

https://sourceryintel.com/reports/humans-vs-datacenters

1over137• 2 months ago

Seems the humans love the AI chatbots though. But I guess they figure they run on magic, not actual electricity and water.

amanaplanacanal• 2 months ago

Some humans do.

trueno2• 2 months ago

context matters. chatbots on sites? companies are wasting money. great way to lose customers. we ripped ours out, i warehouse the data and we had people canceling accounts literally because support agents weren't humans. 99.9% of convos were basically the equivalent to "fuck off clanker let me talk to a real human". for context we have millions of customers in NA, retail company. chat bots are a great way to piss people off is what we learned (i mean most of us called that out at the beginning but the leadership pushed it thru the pipeline anyways). felt very vindicated after we showed them the numbers of how much people hated these things.

latest trend im seeing is the only people touting how great their agent is is people who made their agent. no one is interested in using someone elses agent. very funny social friction we've got growing.

claude/gpt/whatever? yea. sure, i guess but that's a pretty bad faith way of talking about what people love. its just the only mode of taking advantage of this shit, so i guess you could say they like "chatbots" but they are llms so that's exactly how you're supposed to interface with them. so not really meaningful to say "people love chatbots" when it's more likely people like being lazy and having stuff done for them.

im reminded of mark zuckerberg, who thinks that people want to socially network with fake not-real AI profiles. there isn't a soul in the world except mark who thinks this is a cool idea. mark is the goat of having the worst vision ever.

k1w1• 2 months ago

This is the part that really stood out to me.

It’s not only new projects putting strain on the grid though. The report found that an estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption, totaling more than 3 gigawatts, comes from so-called "zombie" workloads—abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue to draw power without doing any useful work.

Containerized sandbox environments for AI can be incredibly wasteful. If those sandboxes are kept available so the user gets sub-second access that is a continual user of RAM, and thus overall computing resources. We built the first version of https://www.aha.io/builder/overview using a typical containerized environment - just like you see with products like Replit - but were appalled at the inefficiency and waste. We rebuilt it from the ground-up to use shared architecture instead with Javascript-level isolation, and almost zero waste. Using shared computing instead of containers means instant startup time, and (almost) zero resource consumption when not active. You still consume disk to store the artifacts, but there is no ongoing RAM or CPU.

I think a reckoning is coming for container-based AI systems too. We are seeing tokens trend towards reflecting the actual cost, and I think the same will be true of containerized runtime environments too.

tadfisher• 2 months ago

We need reliable and ubiquitous checkpointing, then it won't matter if your workload executes in a container runtime or in a WASM sandbox or even on bare metal.

nchmy• 2 months ago

I just discovered that a bunch of repos that I forked on github are running all sorts of Actions daily, to the tune of $200/month.I don't get charged for it because they're public repos. But its evidently doing a bunch of zombie compute, and is happening across everyone's forks... Maybe it's partly why github is shit now.

trueno2• 2 months ago

inb4 "why would you want to hinder progress" types.

seriously its not hard calculus to understand that we were barely scaling energy needs for people, if you're in the US you got a hostile asf admin thats calling everything woke and cancelling the possibilities that we could scale this in a way thats good for the damn planet. so to have datacenters come in and feel entitled to the same utilities that deprioritizes actual living breathing people .... like there is no "progress" argument to be made here. that is the opposite of progress. that is a damn regression.

if datacenters want energy they should unilaterally front the cost of the energy infrastructure to power themselves. since these things are being bankrolled from billionaire entities and idiots, they should have no problem scheduling the mar a lago dinners with the million dollar checks to get this mob of an admin to allow them to do it using "woke" energy infra. we can still live without AI, so you're not a utility yet stop pretending you are one.

same shit as the bitcoin nonsense from 14-17, all the dorkus maximus types claimed that bitcoin mining would force energy to scale and everyone would collectively benefit from greener energy sources. total fever dreams touted by people chasing greed. all of that is a pipe dream, not happening with the powers that be in control and everyone knows it.

bob1029• 2 months ago

I do think token demand might actually become satiated at some point. Machine to machine scenarios imply the potential for infinite sprawl, but machines don't run for free or forever. There is always a human with interest involved somewhere. You can try to hand wave the human away, but at some point you would be forced to reveal who is paying for the electricity, computers, real estate and internet connectivity.

snazypaparazzi• 2 months ago

Sure, but presuming next generation AI is nearly as high utility as a good as a junior engineer, a team of 1-3 seniors could be running projects with 10-30 junior engineers as is. Then consider that much of the throttle on adding more is cost per engineer matching cost of living oriented salary and demotivation effects of giving engineers projects that don't ship and don't further their career path.

I could easily see the equivalent of tens of thousands of engineers being used for companies that had dozens today, making prototypes of every imaginable solution to every RFE in case they are needed by management.

Cost will naturally serve as a limiter but I think most companies will find it hard to compete in their field with anyone who keeps costs similar to today by replacing salaries with energy and hardware capital and continues that cost level by turning all efficiency gains into new build out.

mhjkl• 2 months ago

During the dot com boom they said data centers consumed 8% of US electricity. It was later proven to be a lie, created with fake studies by coal companies to trick the US into building more coal power plants using environmental activist outrage to implant the idea that the internet needs coal into the mainstream. Make of that what you will

JumpCrisscross• 2 months ago

It was later proven to be a lie

Source?

hoytschermerhrn• 2 months ago

Even assuming this was true at all, something happening 30 years ago is not evidence that the exact same thing is happening today.

ksec2• 2 months ago

China might not win on GPU or Software Stack, but they will definitely win on the lower end of the stack which is Datacenters and Electricity Grid infrastructure building out. And I wouldn't be surprised they are 10x the rate of US.

wolvoleo2• 2 months ago

Well yes but they don't have to worry about environmental or social concerns. They can just pollute wherever they want and jail anyone who complains.

Economically it might be more successful but I'd prefer being a citizen somewhere else.

blowscum• 2 months ago

They can just pollute wherever they want and jail anyone who complains.

Hey don’t worry, the US is catching up: https://www.fox4news.com/news/woman-arrested-facebook-post-c...

I suspect the drug addicted pedophile SV elite will start endorsing other Chinese social ideas so that we “don’t fall behind”.

throawayonthe• 2 months ago

..china? what

ksec2• 2 months ago

Putting the human freedom issues aside, I don't see how Datacenter and Electricity production have much environmental or social concerns especially when they are built in mostly remote places. This isn't some manufacturing facility that leaks toxic substances into river. And China's annual solar installation rate is more than the rest of the world combined.

Economically it might be more successful

Economics is what gives you power. US needs to wake up and start taking it seriously rather than feeling good about themselves being the best country in the world.

mlsu• 2 months ago

Theres this weird false dichotomy people do in energy discussions where they imply that you can either be an authoritarian regime with no property rights and build power plants, or have a rule of law and not build any energy infrastructure at all.

Don’t get it twisted. Their superpower is that they actually just build solar panels, wind turbines, and nuke plants. The answer to should we build, is “yes.”

BTW, look at what is happening today, under this administration, at the US EPA sometime.

tim333• 2 months ago

Just as well SpaceX can put them in space instead. Maybe.

Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity–and the Backlash Has Begun

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