From Angus yesterday:
Sunrise. Two of the villages rather polite ( and usually apolitical ) seventy year olds are heading off in their little red Volvo. He a retired professor of economics, she a designer of fabrics for Harrods. They’ve prepared a packed lunch and will be joining a protest against the building of a data centre in a village on the road to Edinburgh. Scotland is an ideal location for these things. It has lots of wind power and no shortage of water to fuel and cool the servers. This combination has attracted droves of resource hungry AI companies. What is only now becoming apparent ( and generating unhappiness ) is the size of these things. The one they’re protesting against will cover 60 hectares and be 12 metres high. That will dwarf the wee place.
12 meters is about 40 feet, and 60 hectares is 148 acres. So presumably it would be an approximately four-story building covering about 6-10 square city blocks, about 84 soccer fields. Why would anyone object?
Angus also mentions the cruise liners he and his wife can see from their garden in the evening:
We stand by the garden wall looking out over the sea as the Orkney bound cruise liners twinkle like gin palaces in the gloaming.
The whole world is changing fast
August 26, 2026
Wow, that would be one massively large building.
Yes!
…that’s huge!
Yes!
times are changing too fast
Agreed!
I have been wondering just how much we all really need these huge new data centers. Tech has been getting along well so far. so I have AI right beside you and here is what it says:
So… do we need huge new ones?
We need data centers, yes.
We don’t necessarily need giant, village?swallowing complexes.
Better approaches exist:
Smaller, distributed centers instead of mega?campuses
Underground or partially buried designs
Retrofitting existing industrial sites
Locating them near renewable energy hubs, not residential villages
Strict limits on size and water use
The problem isn’t the technology — it’s the scale and placement.
Thank you!
Data centers have become hugely unpopular around here!
For good reason. They have to figure out a way to make them less overpowering.
These have become quite controversial!
Yes.
I had no idea how big they will be, and still trying to understand exactly what all of this means.. Its above my tech skills because my old brain doesn’t function like it used to. But I do understand I would not want this building in my neighborhood.
The present designs are not friendly to their neighbors.
That is huge!
Yes.
Data centers use much fewer resources than alarmists are claiming. I wonder how many resources would be used if that land were built on for other purposes? And how the loss of those data centers would reflect on our individual uses of data? I know Dave and I spend most of our days on our computers/tablets/phones so our lifestyles would have to change if these data centers could not keep up with the growth in usage.
It’s not users like us that use all the computing power.
“Twinkle like gin palaces in the gloaming” … I love to imagine that!
Angus does have a way with words. 🙂
I worry that they might be much like the huge utility scale wind turbines that are spread out across the land in West Texas. Many of them are not working and are very expensive to repair. The world is changing for sure.
Often wind turbines are shut off because the farm would produce more electricity than the transmission lines can carry.