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Replying to @harry sure let’s do a few of these

@nate.b.jones
20.7K views1.3K likes3:41ENAug 29, 2026
742 words4007 characters70 sentencesReadability: Grade 5

Transcript

Let's see. I'll go through a few of these. Is it that they use too much power? No. Actually, you can do the math. They do not raise power bills. In many cases, they decrease power bills because they required to bring their own power most of the time. That's because they literally isn't enough power on the grid. Otherwise, you have to bring your own power to the table. So they don't really raise power cost measurably anywhere we've studied. Do they raise taxes? No. In some cases, they decline taxes. In fact, West Virginia is proposing an elimination of state income tax because of data centers. So that's also not correct. Are they big water guzzlers? No. Pistachio farmers are bigger water guzzlers. Beef cattle is a bigger water guzzler. Golf courses are bigger water guzzlers. You don't hear us train to ban those. So water is not the issue. Are they noisy? Not if they're well designed. If they are not well designed, that can be fixed on an existing data center. And so that's not a problem either. Do you need to have power that smells terrible and it emits a lot and is all of that? No, you don't. You can actually use small modular nuclear reactors or you can have well-tuned power plants. That's also not an issue. And all of the things I just described are reasonable restrictions that communities can place on a data center if they are willing to have it in their area. If you want the tax revenue, you are perfectly free as a community to say, you know what? There are certain kinds of power generation we're not going to allow. There are certain kinds of restrictions that we're going to place on noise. There are certain kinds of restrictions we're going to place on water use. Data centers are well-enough engineered. You can do all of that. Still get the data center. Still get the tax revenue. So that is not an issue. I do not want to mistake bad design for the principle that putting an economically valuable asset into place that allows people to have jobs to build the data center is a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And if you think, by the way, that part of the issue is that we have too many data centers and China has fewer data centers and is somehow competing, I've got news for you. China is desperately short data centers. They would like to build more and its chip restrictions on imports that are keeping them from doing so. It is not because they don't have the power. In fact, the entire Chinese AI stack is optimized for abundant power in very few chips, whereas our AI stack is optimized for much less abundant power and a lot of chips. It's just a different way of configuring things. In this situation, part of why they've open-source and open-weighted their models is because they have to. They cannot serve models. And that means they cannot collect income on the models they are building because how do you collect income on an open-waite's model? Part of how you're able to actually have frontier innovation is because you have some kind of economic model to do with inference. And we can say, hey, we want to have these national labs and we want to have them provide benefits to the nation as a whole. I think that's a reasonable thing to say. I think we can talk about that. I'm not saying that those private revenues should only accrue to the corporations and the labs that make them. I think that there's ways to talk about it as a community and say, no, we want to make sure everybody benefits from this. So I'm very much in favor of that. I'm not in favor of outright lies about what a data center actually is. I'm near a data center right now, actually. And it's quite quiet. So yeah, I think it's about making sure that we are able to actually be factual. And by the way, I also saw some comments saying, hey, Nate, would you want one in your neighborhood? Yeah, I would. I would love the tax revenue. I want my schools to be better funded. Please put a data center in my neighborhood. That sounds great. I have no issue with that.