Trump admin sees China behind opposition to AI data centers
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US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
Worse, without sharing the data with feds!
The stated reason for the "terrorist" title was not them being not-rich. It was facilitating a platform which hosted organizations which behave on the extreme end - because it's privacy centered and those elements obviously want that.
If would be a valid discussion point wherever that justifies setting the whole platform on fire, but the way you're making the point ultimately sabotages your message.
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.
Now a good preface to add true or not to avoid being targeted.
Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA
It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
energy lockdowns
Another item from the soylent green checklist.
Three claims of propagandists with agendas.
While I do think AI will be disruptive like other tech advances, I think the manner and extent to which it could cause trouble is rarely discussed in a way that will be looked back on as resembling what actually ends up happening.
Datacenter build outs: use turbines for direct noise and air pollution... or use grid electricity and increase prices for everyone nearby.
Every modern phone, laptop, computer in the world: more expensive thanks to datacenter buildout.
Web experience: slop blogs, slop videos, slop "searches" - would you like more slop with that?
Corporate strategy: lets try to monopolize LLM use!
.. ..
Public Elected Official: Not liking these outcomes makes you a traitor.
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.
They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.
Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.
I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
Today's America has no FDR to save runaway capitalism from itself.
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine...
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
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