This story is maddening. Bessemer city officials are signing NDAs about a proposed hyperscale data center that will require destroying 100 acres of forest, use 90x as much energy as all homes of the city, & threaten a newly discovered species with extinction.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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100 acres is less than a sixth of a square mile, and Bessemer City doesn't use a ton of electricity, being as rural as it is.
The endangered species is more concerning, but feels solvable if they use environmentally conscious design practices with regards to the waterway.
Idk, I think that new data centers are something of a "necessary evil" in our modern society, and they have to be built somewhere.
I can almost guarantee that this data center will be powering more ai slop rather than provide anything even remotely useful.
90x power draw of the city is still an immense increase to the system regardless of the fact the city is small. That means higher bills for the people who were already living there. Let alone the fact that a lot of that power draw will be made of fossil fuel usage only further speeding up climate change. Let alone the fact that the power will not be produced locally meaning power has to be brought it from further away which means more lost to heat through the wires.
Then we should also consider the insane water draw of data centers. They can easily take the water pressure out for people living close enough to the facility. Forget how wasteful they are with the water and how that will only speed up water wars. Or how that will increase the cost of water to the local community who again was there first.
This is also ignoring the insane light pollution that will come off of the data center as they will happily have really bright lights on 24/7.
Some data centers are necessary, but not ones that power ai slop. We also need a lot of regulation on data centers to prevent them from harming the communities who were there first. To make them be responsible for the pollution they are causing and make them responsible for the water they waste everyday.
Sure, new data centers are a necessary evil that have to be built somewhere, but …..
What’s in it for the town?
- are they claiming jobs? Like 12?
- are they claiming a new water system for everyone? At whose cost?
- will this benefit the community in some way?
- is there excess power that needs to be used?
Sure they should be somewhere but how about somewhere with the infrastructure to support it? Somewhere already developed?
Don't do it. Water is an increasingly precious resource and giving away a states worth of water and power to a data center is not worth the money.
Documents show that the energy and water projected to be consumed by the data center campus are staggering. If built to full capacity, the Bessemer data center campus could consume around 10.5 million megawatt hours of energy per year, based on estimates provided to residents by representatives of the data center development.
That’s more than 90 times the amount of energy used by all residences in Bessemer annually, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That's half the annual generation of the largest power plant in the US.
A recent regulatory filing by county officials estimated that water usage by the facility could amount to 2 billion gallons per day. That’s more than five times the entire state’s daily residential usage, according to government figures.
I have to admit this can be only horseshit. I don't want to be an apologist.
Here another slightly older figure: That's the entire daily fresh groundwater use of the entire US.
"Were so bad our jobs otherwise, now we're desperate."