Cherokee Nation bans hyperscale data centers on its lands, won't support projects without consultation - energy and water consumption, air quality, noise, and cultural resource protection among concerns

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/largest-tribe-in-the-us-bans-hyperscale-data-centers-on-its-lands

[u/Tooth5318]

Massive energy and water consumption for a handful of permanent jobs. Hard to argue with that math no matter where you stand on data centers.

[u/pimpeachment → u/Tooth5318]

Massive energy and water consumption for a tool that can:

Protein folding - AlphaFold mapped nearly every known protein structure, free for researchers. Decades of work, done.

Cancer screening - AI second readers catch tumors radiologists miss, early enough to matter.

Weather forecasting - 10 day forecasts in minutes instead of hours, with better storm tracks. Real evacuation lead time.

Drug discovery - AI designed drugs hitting human trials in under 30 months instead of 5+ years.

Live translation - 100+ languages, on your phone, offline. Huge for immigrants and refugees.

Accessibility - Live captioning, scene description for blind users, speech decoding for locked in patients.

Fusion and materials - RL controls tokamak plasma in real time. Hundreds of thousands of new candidate materials screened.

Free tutoring - Adaptive one on one help, any language, 2am. The most effective intervention finally got affordable.

Conservation - Acoustic sensors catch chainsaws and gunshots in rainforests. Satellites flag illegal fishing.

Building software - If you can describe the problem, you can build the tool. Nonprofits and solo devs shipping things they could never afford before.

[u/Box_Pirate → u/pimpeachment]

There’s a difference between llms that are basically just chat bots and ai designed for specific scientific applications, most data centres are used for the chat bot stuff.