Furthermore the initial draft talked about aggregate data anyway. The EU really shouldn't care about individual DCs anyway.
As long as they keep the water clean (and pay for the relevant environmental load quotas) and have the permits who the fuck cares? It's idiotic anti-AI hysteria.
The quote about "ramping up their lobbying efforts" is also absurd, it's just a few lines after the paragraph that describes that the commission asked for feedback from the industry as part of some standard consultative process.
The most crazy part seems to be the commission's "we have always been at war with Eastasia" behavior regarding the confidentiality.
It’s not "no one", but rather "almost no one". The difference is small, but still big enough to make room for me and a surprisingly large number of my friends and acquaintances—including our raised middle fingers.
We don't have to be in the majority; the main thing is that there's a niche for us. If the whole world is smoking crack, that's not ideal. But at least we don't have to go along with it.
As inequality grows in any part of the globe that money will be used to corrupt the rest of the world. The EU is not immune to it.
So, we all need to fight against wealth accumulation, inequality and corruption.
This is an example. The corrupting influence of "Big money" up against transparency
Transparency helps, especially in Europe where civil society runs deep.
My mind is blown by the USAnian president blatantly grafting, out in the open, and it is not a political liability. Many political analysts think that is what cost Orbán the Hungarian election
As long as they pay the quotas it doesn't matter. DCs don't eat the water, people can go and take samples, measure temperature. Heck, how complicated it will be to put out a solar panel powered thermometer with a SIM card? Or set up a drone with a IR camera to fly around a DC each day? If someone wants to carry out a crusade against DCs, sure, there's plenty of precedent for that too! (see Cervantes 1605 and 1615) And of course if hedge funds want to know when to short the AI bubble they'll be doing the same anyway, so the commission should ask them to publish their data with a few months lag.
https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-ma...
Just this week we launched a datacenter hat runs 100% on renewable energy even in case when diesel engines have to turn on and seeking LEED certification: https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/dels... - the available energy to the DC is always trumpeted in topic. Yeah, we are kind of proud of technical achievements and efficiency achieved.
But we have the luxury as being slightly nordic, not needing to consume water for cooling. And what is not widespread but taking effect is that datacenters are able to give the heat for useful purposes like heating homes. It needs datacenter to be in city and cooperation for gov agencies, but this is the path that is being taken across countries: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-cen...
Exactly - would be nice if that information was public knowledge!
And power has a tendency to accumulate. Powerful people always use their power to increase their power. There are no exceptions.
Other examples in the US would include SpaceX, which supposedly is not about profit but about building a mars colony (and so far their actions seem to align with that), or Rupert Murdoch's media empire that's at least as much about spreading right wing views in the anglosphere as it is about money.
The word you are looking for is greed.
In my experience, it is always people.
Any single person or group in a corporation is expendable. You can swap out the sales department or a CEO, and the corporation will continue on its course without a pause or major change of direction. No single person or group of people is in total control of the direction - what directs the corporation is the sum total of ideas, vibes, internal influences, bylaws, operating practices, assets, and external environment of competitors and markets and regulatory landscape. The people that make up a corporation may be diverse and have conflicting goals, but if there's one thing they're all aligned on, is that they all want to keep their jobs and increase their pay or influence. I.e. they want the corporation to go on, to survive at least to their next paycheck.
The end result is, a corporation can be seen as an independent entity - kinda like an animal (or a super-colony for more accurate comparison) with a survival drive independent of the people that form it.
As I said, in my experience, the humans - interchangible or not, as customers, competitors, owners etc - determine what happens, not the corporation itself.
Can look at a corporate as "living thing" itself, but I think that underestimates the human side.
5000 barely connected people isn't a corporation, it's a mob. A corporation has more to it.
In fact people aren't much more important that the software that runs on them. Because that's what all the bureaucracy is - all those rules and bylaws and contractual obligations and checklists and playbooks and regulation - software running on a runtime made of meat, one form letter or internal memo at a time.
Most of the time, losing people is to corporation what clipping a toe nail is to an adult, or a bit flip to a modern computer - a non-event you barely notice and carry on.
> higher intelligence can emerge
Nobody said "higher intelligence". I mentioned animals, ant supercolonies, but the same patterns of behavior is visible in even most basic multi-cellular and single-cellular organisms.
> Do not anthropomorphize.
Nobody says you need to.
(Except with LLMs, where refusing to do so means you'll just remain confused about what can or cannot, should or should not, be done with them.)
For example, a company decision-maker responsible for picking the city/county/country in which their company will put a new factory is in position of great influence on municipal/regional/national level politics - simply because the people want jobs, and politicians want to be popular with the people.
To be more precise, the people want to live within a certain standard. I can’t think of anyone¹ who really wants a job. Purpose, something to do, money (which translates to standard of living), recognition, sure, but those don’t really necessitate a job, as in something you have to do on the regular to be able to survive through the indirection of money.
The distinction is important because those who have the power you described are also the ones who have the biggest incentive to perpetuate this notion that everyone needs a job and that there’s no other way the system could work. Thus, by framing it in the context of jobs we’re discussing on their terms and have already lost.
¹ For sure there’ll be someone, but not enough to be meaningful.
No job is the goal. No money is the problem.
In theory, full communism prevents corruption by removing its structural causes rather than relying on laws or moral exhortation. And since corruption under capitalism (in Marxist analysis) stems from private ownership, class divisions, and the scramble for scarce resources, abolishing those conditions should eliminate the incentives that drive people to exploit positions of power for personal gain. Without private property to accumulate or a state apparatus to capture, the reasoning goes, there would simply be nothing left to be corrupt about.
Right, it becomes mostly the corruption of power, and the lengths people will go to in order to retain it. It’s astonishing that is not recognized as a problem.
That’s not the least of my concerns. My problem with capitalism is its desire to influence politics in its favor, and the utter lack of regulation amongst politicians (ie self regulation) to forbid this practice.
The whole industry of lobbying should not be allowed to exist.
I guess we need to pay politicians enough. And have very very strict checks on their wealth. Maybe even only pick people with no families and don't allow them property. That would essentially eliminate bribery. Question is what else would it do... Nothing is so simple in the end.
But yes any such system has to be very simple at it's core.
Large data center operators are already far more transparent with their annual reports than any other industry.
https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2026/04/17/comm...
To reach HN you are probably hopping via some communication hubs that may be located in datacenter.
You are going to store to buy some stuff which probably hosts their infra in a datacenter or use datacenter services.
You do use mobile phone? Well they also need to host services somewhere and make connectivity.
The school where your kids go either uses school management software and/or websites which provide educational material or doing exams.
Then you have online video conferencing...
I mean this list could get pretty long - I think listing them here on HN is kind of useless. It is just the datacenter infra is at the very bottom, providing foundational but invisible service to end users. Just like we don't see how things are manufactured or how raw materials are sourced for making real stuff, same goes with datacenter.