https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Mi_1
And now they make one of the fastest cars ever created and frontier-level AI. In just over a decade. 你好!
I fully expect Baidu and other tech giants on the Chinese shores to try and push the boundaries of technology. Silicon Valley (and the US) in general has always been the hot-bed of innovation. But with enormous increase in wealth in China (and to an extent in India), I can see these companies being more and more ambitious. Not long ago Andrew Ng of Coursera and Stanford AI Lab fame joined Baidu to further their rival to the 'Google Brain' project.
Xiaomi has long been positioning itself as a company with design chops of Apple, engineering chops of Google, and e-commerce chops of Amazon, all rolled into one-- and I can see where they are coming from. If they manage to pull it off, I guess that's when we'd start seeing the proverbial "Death of Silicon Valley" as in, it loosing its strange monopoly and strangle hold on tech world in terms of both talent and innovation.
I know it's more mixed and complex than this, but i think a big opposition is not to the data centers themselves but to their locations. Too often it feels like the centers are exploiting local resources and community infrastructure rather than paying their share or locating themselves in places that are less likely to cause problems to home owners.
The whole process feels indifferent or even adversarial at times.
A good start would be to limit new data center construction to zero-emissions DC-only compute. Slap a ZEDCO badge on it and you’ll get that buy-in you’re looking for.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-...
But I don’t see how local temperatures on the site of the DC itself is somehow an existential threat to people in the area unless their house is 50’ away from it.
At the end of the day NIMBYs always have their opinions about everything from views to noise to traffic, but there’s a limit to how much rights one has to control the property beyond one’s own land.
I think there's something social going on.
Of course electricity wouldn't be such a problem if US government chose to invest in cheap, sustainable energy sources and upgrade its grid. China is building solar and nuclear like crazy, and that gives them a massive advantage here.
Hopefully in future elections Americans choose a candidate and party that isn't bought by the fossil fuel lobby.
And Newsom also doesn’t support nuclear, while our electricity prices are already over double most other states.
The Democratic Party’s modern strategy about energy seems to be to just throw wrenches into the existing fossil fuel world (because that’s the easy part) and then wag the finger at consumers when they complain. “Well, you gross polluter, you should have just bought a $40,000 EV and a $700,000 house to put $25,000 solar panels on!”
To be clear, I’d love to vote for a Democrat who had a real energy policy that replaced dirty energy with clean, and was able to get tons of people into EVs where practical.
So is it the water? I don't know where i sit on the water argument. Equinix near LAX had chillers, i guess, but really it's just massive HVAC. chillers don't work everywhere (my understanding). I don't remember plumes of humidity coming off the facility, either. I also don't remember being able to hear it from outside the building, or even in the foyer before you went through the mancatchers.