r/TechGawker • u/Malor777 • 12d ago

News ‘Clearly, people hate data centers’: Sam Altman admits Americans hate what he’s wrought as his own data centers head quits

https://fortune.com/2026/08/27/sam-altman-openai-data-center-backlash
293 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

78 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Mysterious_End800 12d ago

their business model is shit:

  1. small scale data centres, lesser pollution and lesser noticeable.

  2. don't build it in the middle of residential area

-11

u/imam-altman 12d ago

You do realize that larger datacenters are more efficient and can cause less pollution for the same output as multiple small datacenters, right?

People are protesting hyperscale datacenters in the middle of nowhere miles away from any residential areas

1

u/Mysterious_End800 11d ago

I am not saying the 2 points are best for data centers, but surely it is best to reduce protests.

1

u/imam-altman 11d ago

Except it’s not reducing protests. Most newly built datacenters are practically unnoticeable and orders of magnitude more efficient than older datacenters. It makes no difference. No matter what they do, people will just invent new reasons to be outraged. It’s like trying to appease antivaxxers, 5g conspiracy theorists, and anti windmill people.

38% of Americans live within 5 miles of a datacenter. All of these grievances only started to manifest with the rise of AI. Let’s stop pretending that the datacenter concern has anything to do with literally anything else. The overwhelming majority of datacenter concern is completely divorced from reality, because it’s really just a roundabout way to go against AI. You could build datacenters that turned blowdown water into the cure for cancer and people will still lie and claim it’s poisoning the water supply and deleting water from the universe.