I can tell you, based on local examples, that politicians are setting up deals to bring in data centers without trying to build community support first. Not only that, they are often signing NDAs that prohibit them from telling voters what they have agreed to. It's no way to operate in a democracy, and voters are right to be angry.
These companies aren't coming in, buying property at market rates, and developing it with existing infrastructure under current zoning laws. They usually want tax breaks, major infrastructure changes, and other accommodations and guarantees. It's completely reasonable for people to want a dialog with their representatives before those kinds of arrangements are made with a company on their behalf. And it's entirely reasonable for them to vote out reps that are overly accommodating.
I live in an historic district. I had to attend a public meeting a couple years ago to get approval to change a lamp post. It is perfectly reasonable to ask tech companies to show up and defend massive projects to the public.
A meeting to get a lamp post change is exactly how progress stops. It is why we can't build anything in US and it costs a billion dollars per mile of high speed rail.
The two are often difficult to dissociate. My town had a fairly fractious town meeting around a rezoning proposal that was mostly for a fairly specific commercial purpose--that passed through a basically procedural mechanism in a second meeting.
Not really. I was just born there and it wasn’t as touristy when I was a child. It blew up as touristy place when I was a teenager and in my twenties.
My parents had odd jobs, construction, chemical processing operations. There was some small scale industry running there as well but it went bust when people wanted fresh air for tourism. Even if the industry was really small scale for marketing sake local government got rid of all of it.
I also don’t live there anymore as I wrote „I was living in a touristy area”.
If I would stay there, there was no future for me there.
Well not really. I couldn’t care less. I would move out anyway.
I just have seen firsthand how people who claim to be „for the local community” on the posters when it is election time — doing exactly the opposite otherwise.
Some information is legally required for them to disclose, if they’re acting in their official capacity. I feel like development on public land is too big to hide.
OpenAI isn't a convincing source. Of course they're going to blame everything on someone else. They don't want to acknowledge the very real hate for AI that people have. It's also extremely likely that they themselves are involved in the very same thing but to push AI instead.
Do you consider the American fight for Civil rights to have been motivated by Nazi (or Soviet) propaganda? Would one's opposition to the Nazis preclude them from supporting Civil Rights based on some truth exploited by Nazi propagandist?
And on the other side this is the foreign adversarial way to hinder US AI progress, develop and encourage anti-datacenter sentiment which this kind of secrecy and antidemocratic behavior plays right into.
Is it really a matter of "national security" when the technology at hand is being used in a way that unilaterally benefits a small class of oligarchs at the expense of the rest of society? That's not really in the benefit of the nation anymore, is it?
Depends on what you think "the nation" is. Is it the "regular people"? Or is it the elite? (And whichever you think it is, and no matter how obvious you think it is, there are people who think it is obviously the opposite.)
I don't understand why people think they should be able to vote on things like this. Especially when they lack the necessary credentials to have an informed opinion on it.
So what are the topics people should be able to vote on? I don't think people have the necessary credentials to vote on immigration, drug price regulation, social media regulation? Why let people vote at all, they don't know anything apparently.
> I can tell you, based on local examples, that politicians are setting up deals to bring in data centers without trying to build community support first. Not only that, they are often signing NDAs that prohibit them from telling voters what they have agreed to. It's no way to operate in a democracy, and voters are right to be angry.
People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood that involves non-public land just doesnt make any sense to me.
Why do people think that because they have a house somewhere they should get the ability to freeze an entire town in time and disallow anyone to build anything. Seriously, where did this mindset come from?
This may come as a surprise to you, but people like living in pleasant surroundings.
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.
The next town over from where I live has basically no rules. No zoning, if you want to turn your property into a junkyard go right ahead! Even still, people are successfully fighting against a trash company putting in a landfill. I believe the lever they're pulling is a state wetlands permit. The system is working.
So many of these conversations come back to the problem of privatized gains and socialized losses.
Most things that create value have externalities. I kill the moss on my roof, then it rains and the chemicals go into the stream, then you try to go fishing and get skunked. I exerted my freedom as a private property owner and got the benefits; you paid for the drawbacks. We're all pulling from the same pile of resources, and the Earth doesn't care where your picket fence is.
Data centers incur expensive externalities and you're asking the general public to bear those costs -- or "pay those taxes," if that resonates more. I suppose NIMBYism is part of it, but we're not talking about ugly condos here, we're talking about towns running out of electricity: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-....
Your argument makes sense until you have a horrible neighbor. You can see it in action in a state like Montana which to my knowledge prohibits housing covenants. Want to park 12 cars that are rusting in your front yard? Do it! Neighbors can't do anything about it. But that does have the effect of lowering property value and degrading the neighborhood.
You may be confusing Montana with a much-worse place.
Or confusing with State law preventing homeowners' associations (HOAs) from enforcing new covenants that restrict the use of your property, compared to what was allowed when you originally purchased it.
NIMBYism has been popular for a long time. People really do want datacenters (or at least, the things that having datacenters enable).. they just want them somewhere else.
I'm not sure anyone but investors chasing yield feel a very strong need to see the planet covered in AI data centers, especially when the benefits seem to be rolling up, not down.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood that involves non-public land just doesnt make any sense to me.
Would you like me to buy the lot next to your house and set up a 3000W sound system pumping noise music 24 hours directly at your bedroom? Because that's what you're arguing for.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property
Yes, I believe that’s called “society” and while we are all very disappointed about your personal liberties I’m afraid some compromises had to be made to allow people other than you to have property rights too.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property
If the data center existed in a vaccum, with no inputs or outputs, this argument would hold some weight.
Instead, they stress limited water supplies, cause power shortages, increase GHG emissions (which we, the public ultimately have to pay for, either through mitigation or dealing with the damage after the fact).
Oh, and also they may well have negative externalities to employment. They definitely have negative externalities to communication, the internet has been flooded with AIshit.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood
So... iron smeltery next door for you then? Acid rain?
Come on. There is reasonable concern for property rights and civil coexistence and then there's Randian Libertarian Claptrap, and you've hopped right into the deep end.
YES, government has a clear and obvious interest, as a matter of principle, in the regulation of land use and development. This doesn't change just because you think the government made a wrong decision in a particular instance. The solution is to fix the government. Go vote for datacenter candidates. Seems like no one else is.
A few months ago the founders of the top AI companies walked into Capitol Hill. Tried to explain to a room full of elected representatives exactly how their technology was going to put almost half the working population into under/unemployment and they should consider UBI [0]. Then they went back to the airport, got on their corporate jets, and went home secure in the knowledge that they really showed them. That they were the smartest people in the room.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.
* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems
* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.
* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.
I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
I think it's a fool's errand to believe populaces resist data centers, or take up issues in general, for any of the rational reasons you listed. It's propaganda using m
legacy/social media to fuel movements. The only question is who the propaganda is from. The boogeyman guess would be China but i honestly have no clue. Either way, when you engage most of those against data centers, their positions are generally baseless (not that the anti data center movement is without merit - its just most of the movement is not in it due to rationality or logic)
> I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.
I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.
Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.
I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
More electricity than water around here—rates going up gets everyone’s attention—but there’s nothing supposedly about the water use: data centers don’t consume the water permanently but they still put stress on systems which weren’t designed for the extra volume, pushing requests for expensive expansion projects, and there can be other problems: a colleague mentioned his family back home recently learned that the extra water circulation was spreading a groundwater pollution plume substantially faster, affecting well water users in the area. Since these things tend not to contribute many jobs, there isn’t much to balance out the bad news for communities.
I have zero faith in the current generation of gen AI. I think the claims are overblown and the odds of massive unemployment is near zero.
Even if the AI bubble pops, the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers. I don’t care if a data center developer/speculator loses their shirt. The data center will stand long after they fold and someone will operate it.
Build it here. Create the construction jobs. Collect the property taxes.
Most people I know (in Utah) are predominantly concerned with the pollution and water use. Water is the most ubiquitous concern across politics in Utah. No matter what political ideology you adhere to, water rights and water conservation are a core topic. If you watch local news for more than an hour or two, you will see propaganda to "slow the flow". One of the most common criticisms of our Governor is that he publicly prays for rain, while using an incredible amount of water on his own alfalfa farms.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
Why is water so inexpensive? Shouldn’t the price per gallon increase exponentially? It seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult to come up with curves so that typical households pay very little for water and the big users pay a lot for water.
I'm local-ish to Box Elder county in Utah, here people absolutely give a shit about the environmental burden to the region. It isn't just about water consumption, but other things. I think the "We need to win China is AI" narrative is (appropriately???) falling of deaf ears. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but even lay-people in my circles have asked how these alleged AI_driven benefits (fighting cancer, stopping climate change, and whatever) are really going to come to fruition, when what they really observe in their backyards are data centers being generated so we can fill our lives with AI slop.
Box elder is particularly egregious. 9GW of new natural gas burning power concentrated in 1 location in a state that already suffers from poor air quality.
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
Plenty of people care about their power bill. Water in some regions is a hot political issue. Data centers don’t create jobs of course, we don’t need anyone to answer that.
"Some regions" being a a bit of an understatement, the US west and southwest are experiencing (or about to experience) severe water shortages and disruption due to the current water shortages.
Lake Mead is projected next year to be at its lowest level since it was filled by the creation of Hoover Dam. The states on the Colorado River have been fighting over the dwindling water for decades. Locals care about water.
Out here in the US southwest, we absolutely do care about water usage as well as the potential for higher electricity prices. We also care about jobs, which in the case of data centers are only going to be boosted temporarily until construction is finished.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
Why do people want to work if AI can do the job? What's up with the data center hate?
Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI? Why aren't more people demanding UBI instead of demonizing data centers? The corpus they are trained on belongs to humanity. It's humanity's data. The gains belong to all of us. Is it just American hatred of anything that seems socialist? Imagine if in the the optimistic sci fi stories someone interrupted to complain they wanted to unplug the AI so they could be the one to fill out the spreadsheets.
Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway? Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us? Why use government to turn off the spigot rather than redirect the flow?
The feds minimum wage is still $7.25, who is actually going to believe the government will implement UBI based on some vague and evasive answers about UBI?
We have a higher chance of the world ending than getting UBI in America. This is a country that can't even get basic universal healthcare going. Even if we did somehow get UBI, with who's controlling the country, there's almost no chance it wouldn't be abused to control people.
Losing your job means losing your livelihood and often your life for the vast majority of people.
That's not even getting into any loss of purpose or identity it might cause people. For better or for worse, working and jobs are a major part of the social fabric of society, and it would take a non-insignificant amount of time for that to change. Trying to abruptly shift that would not go well.
This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.
If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter? Is it even good policy beyond not wanting something in your own backyard?
> This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.
I don't see why you think that. Its something that:
1) These CEOs and people with power want
2) The populace has some degree of control over, since its local politics vs national.
That makes it an attractive way to push back against powerful people that they see as operating in bad faith. It seems like their chances here are much better than trying to go directly to congress and advocating for UBI.
This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people. A world in which you can actually stop the buildout is a world in which lobbying Congress is much easier.
You have control over who you vote for. Congress is not elected nationally. Sorry I just don't see how your points make sense. You might have better success of pushing the data centers off to your neighbor. But this doesn't stop the buildout, it only gives certain neighborhoods temporary protection while economic conditions for most continue to deteriorate. Aka a false sense of security and therefore a bad idea.
Your position pretty much sounds like "you can't stop it so why try" thus making it a "bad idea" which is really doesn't make any sense. Right now, they are attempting to build data centers in the worst possible places with issues such as not enough water supply, not enough energy and forcing the everyone in those communities to suffer. Clearly "forcing buildout to another area" is not a bad idea.
> This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people.
Its much easier to put someone who is aligned with your values into a local political position than congress. And its much more likely that your neighbors will vote in a way that aligns with your interests. And you won't get overridden by a congressman from several states away that has different incentives.
Yes, people building data centers can just shop for a new location. But resistance to data centers appears to be pretty correlated with living in communities that are good places to data center, at least anecdotally.
The world I'm looking in is one where citizens pushing back locally has seemed to get at least some measure of success, albeit spotty, whereas attempts to lobby Congress about AI has been screaming into the void. Frankly, I think your position here is completely divorced from what is actually happening in reality.
If the reality you believe in is one in which pockets of local resistance to data centers is going to meaningfully derail AI buildout across the country then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
It's a bad idea. The few communities that succeed are still going to suffer the macro consequences of data centers being built in the next town over.
I don't think anyone is expecting to seriously "derail AI" just by preventing data centers from being built in their neighborhood. But they can at least inconvenience the people they see as the perpetrators. If you can't win the fight, and can't walk away, at least you can give your opponent a bloody lip. And who knows, maybe it gets steam and the people in congress who have been actively ignoring them have incentives to at least throw them a bone.
If there were serious macro consequences then maybe it would be an issue but from the point of view of the communities -- there aren't. Data centers don't bring a lot of permanent employment and tend to be given tax breaks. They are skeptical that data centers are the boon that these people claim they are -- and they are right to be so since people pushing these data centers have been wildly untrustworthy at best.
Saying "You can't stop it so you might as well get on board and hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI" is going to go over like a lead brick. There's no reason to trust that UBI will come if you give up any leverage you have, even if it is a minuscule amount of leverage.
I appreciate your perspective. Just to be clear, I wasn't advocating one simply surrenders and "hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI".
I think I'm more curious why more serious advocacy of UBI itself isn't a major platform vs the things I hear often about data centers.
I think in some ways you have touched on that but also as your comment indicates perhaps as part of negotiations as things develop UBI will come more into the forefront. I just see a lot of national politics also around data centers but relatively few on UBI. Again, if you agree that at best this is an "inconvenience" to the status quo then I would think you would also share my surprise or maybe hope that stronger voices should emerge promoting a more sustainable solution - aka UBI.
Sometimes it feels like data centers are just a distraction from that more far reaching and yet necessary conversation. Perhaps it is simply a prelude. Thanks for the discussion.
> If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter?
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question? Yes, it is incomprehensibly harder to fundamentally change the fabric and structure of society, especially in a way that involves giving "free" money to people, than it is to prevent something from being built.
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question?
Trying to control something by merely protecting your own backyard never works. America has reinvented its own social contract many times, it's why we are still here 250 years later. What side would you have been on in the lead up to the civil war? The nothing ever happens side? Or civil rights? Or the New Deal? The world wars?
America has changed profoundly since the founding. Yes change is hard. So is a nation surviving for 250 years. The point is why politically agitate for a mid outcome. American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature. Have you read the founding documents? I mean I don't mean to be rude.
Okay, Jeb Bartlett, that's a nice speech, but you're suggesting that real people need to all get on board a platform which doesn't even have enough appeal to get a plurality of everyday voters supporting it[1], and should maybe even be prepared to fight a literal civil war(?) in the hopes that minority will prevail.
> American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature.
That part I agree with, though I would say maybe 'fantasy-based' may be better descriptor than 'aspirational' at present. Democrats for example think making a few billionaire sell their yachts would pay for universal healthcare forever (when current Medicare just for old people alone costs 1,118,000,000,000 a year), and Republicans think we can ban abortion and then no one will have anymore abortions.
Relying on polls is a lame argument. Kamala Harris should be president I guess. The people yearn for Liz Cheney and economic opportunity zones.
Maybe a Democrat President who actually pitched UBI with the same gusto as the current president talked about "they're eating the cats and dogs" would do well. Polls are really useless when it comes to predictive power. If the last 10 years haven't taught you that I guess nothing ever well.
On what scale? On the scale of a nation-state it certainly is. Most of ones you will likely name that have been around longer under the surface had far more discontinuities than it would appear. Take France, it's on its Fifth Republic I think, to say nothing of its medieval nature.
The United States is actually quite remarkable for 250 years of government under the same constitution. Please give some counter examples I'll wait.
At least in the US, the public simply does not trust that the United States government will consider such a thing. They won't even consider universal healthcare. No-one is going to go "OK we trust you, you can build your data-centers now and we'll talk about UBI once you've 'disrupted' our jobs."
Yes, a bunch of CEOs are making the rounds talking about it, but talk is cheap. Even if that talk is directed at congress. Have any of them even cleared the flow bar of funding research into how it'd work and what the policy would look like?
You're making a huge assumption there that UBI would be implemented successfully. On paper it sounds great to me, but if it's not done incredibly skillfully, UBI would just be a fast track to Zimbabwe-style economic ruin, except instead of just producing humorous-looking banknotes for the rest of the world, I'm pretty sure complete economic collapse of the US would have... a few pretty bad knock-on effects on most other countries, as in like, 2008 squared.
The biggest danger of UBI is that, since every seller knows now that every buyer has at minimum $XXXX/month to work with, anything that sounds like a great deal to someone at that income level will be repriced so that it's out of reach. e.g.
Your job income was $4000 a month, rent was $2000, childcare $1000, food, $500, car expenses $500. Now UBI comes around. All these things go up. Why do they go up? Some people say greed. This is wrong! There are still, say, 1000 2-bedroom apartments in your city, but now people have more money. Many people have been wanting to move up and now they can afford the $2000 rent. Maybe all the landlords are good Democrats and refuse to have would-be tenants bid, so they simply rent out all 1000 at the same $2000 rent (using a lottery to award them).
But now there are 200 more people who want apartments, and no apartments for them. Everyone knows there is this shortage. They're even willing to pay $2500 or $2700. New units are built that would not have been worth building at $2000 rent but which pencil out great at $2700 or $3000.
>Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us?
Prices are indeed just a label of whether we have a surplus, just right, or a shortage, but they're coded in psychology. We instinctively know what feels like an okay price for most things, and anything above that is a nearly 100% reliable indicator that we in fact have a shortage of that thing. And of course, the inverse too, which is why you see clearance racks with great deals on phone cases for 5-year-old cell phones.
You asked if we have more than enough excess. I'd say, no, we have for instance, way too few houses, and also not enough energy. Also not nearly enough semiconductors. Those are just a small sample, but those things are obviously pretty dang important. And we also of course have shortages of labor in actually useful fields like doctors, nurses, tax attorneys, auto mechanics, but way too much labor in other college-educated fields with less obvious applicability to life.
Most Europeans seem quite happy with their societes and the levels of redistribution of wealth. As do the citizens of most petro or other resource rich states. If compute is the new energy then many states with a similar advantage aggressively and successfully redistribute gains and have a higher quality of life for the median person than Americans enjoy.
I would say the distributions from automated water heaters/boilers, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators replacing “ice boxes”, looms, assembly lines, farming combines, electric starter motors, and automated PCB assembly have been overwhelmingly good for people across a very broad spectrum of society.
Is that what you’re also looking at? Or objecting to the rewards rightly earned for bringing such advances to so many people’s lives?
We should be happy with a disproportionate amount of wealth going to rent seekers because they let us buy their goods and work in their companies making them even wealthier?
The wealthy always skew the rules to favor themselves, e.g. US capital gains being taxed at a lower rate than labor. The global standard of living has been going up but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.
People who create wealth for society by inventing and providing goods and services that others find valuable enough to buy are, by definition, not rent seeking when they do those things.
If you have complaints against rent seekers, that’s fine, but that’s not against “labor saving innovations” and it would probably serve you well to not confuse them, so you don’t inadvertently object to life-improving inventions.
Right, it's usually not the inventors, artists, etc. who reap the wealth generated by their creativity. The already-wealthy divert a disproportionate share of that productivity to themselves.
> but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.
Unfalsifiable claim since we can't predict what could have been if things had been done completely differently. But, Cuba distributes wealth more justly, so where are all the innovators coming out of Cuba? Where is the quality of life?
In fact, there are undoubtedly more Cubans building things, inventing things, and performing valuable services in the US than there are in Cuba, because in the US we allow you to be rewarded for providing something valuable to society.
If you turn the country into a wealth-redistribution paradise, the smartest people will all go somewhere else, because people don't want to work purely "For the Motherland." They want to help their country and provide for their own family's wellbeing too.
History has provided examples of this, but to top off their failure to deliver higher quality of life, most nations that established themselves explicitly to ensure fair distribution of wealth couldn't even restrain their elites from gorging at the "communal" trough to the point the commoners suffered great deprivation.
There are many alternative ways to distribute wealth, Cuban communism being only one of them. Capitalists would like us to believe in a false dichotomy between democratic capitalism and totalitarian communism.
Instead of Cuba, why not point to the sovereign wealth funds of Norway or Alaska? Or farmers' co-ops in the American midwest? Or just the generally successful democratic socialist countries in Europe where standard of living is better by many measures than in the US?
None of those are perfect, but they show that commerce and wealth distribution don't have to be purely "it takes money to make money".
It doesn't have to be. Social cohesion and not having to work are already major benefits.
UBI is already premised on the fact that top earners will have to give something up if UBI is going to make sense. I've been relatively blessed, but I know no one's future is guaranteed. Thinking one has to only best accrue their own pile in a world of disruption doesn't make sense. Eventually the Bastille gets stormed. Why not get ahead of it and avoid the terror? Why burn the data center?
It's hard for people to see a socialist benefit when everything about the current version of AI seems like it's going to have an intensely focused capitalist outcome throwing us all simultaneously forwards and backwards into technofeudalism.
You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind of life. Which is not the elected representatives problem if it happens to happen more than 4 years into the future.
More of a lot of things. Universal healthcare (as opposed to employer-provided plans) encourages people to start their own businesses. UBI would be similar, but moreso.
We currently have a not-insignificant population living the UBI dream. No job, section 8 housing, food stamps, free healthcare via going to the emergency room for everything and not simply not paying, as well as other social programs.
What great art are these folks producing since they aren't burdened by having to work to survive? Mumble rap on Soundcloud? Shitty graffiti on every building?
It’s reaching the point of absurdity in my area. People are bringing “All data centers are flammable” signs to city meetings.
A plot of land that’s already zoned for the heaviest of industrial activities, is across the street from a dump, 3 miles from an airport, 16 miles from a nuclear generating station, and in a region with good climate, and no water crunch is a pretty good place for a data center.
Facts don’t matter, it’s a religious fight. Even if you provide numbers specific to the local area there’s no way to pierce the rhetoric.
Too much land? I added up lol the land used by the 10+ golf courses in the area. Dwarfs the proposal.
Too much water? I called the head of the parks department and asked them how much water the golf courses that they operate use each year. Massive.
Regional electricity costs going up? Our nuclear generating station already sells 80-85% of all power generated wholesale to other markets.
Data centers are loud? I measured the noise outside of my house. I live on a busy street. It was much louder than the viral videos going around Facebook with titles like “Data center noise from my porch SCARY MUST WATCH”.
I don’t know about all proposed data centers everywhere, but the one they’re eyeing to build in my backyard is fine by me.
I lived in Northern Virginia for years. Data centers are everywhere.
It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are actually far more efficient than the alternatives. Just don’t run them on coal, natural gas, or the souls of orphans. And don’t rely exclusively on evaporative cooling if it’s in the desert.
They’re having fun treating tech people like villains. It was the same or worse with bankers back in 2008-2010. Anything I have to say, any data provided, any comparisons made, are biassed because I “use data centers”. When I explain that they use data centers as well, I get the finger.
When I talked to an anti data center family member who runs a local Facebook news group (5,000+ subscribers) they just kept sending me Google AI summaries as counter points… My god. I don’t even use gen AI.
People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”. All of this on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. How many data centers are involved to get a post from poster to viewer? 2? 3? 8?
A bad data center project proposal somewhere should not mean opposition to data center projects everywhere.
> It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are actually far more efficient than the alternatives.
This isn't about efficiency, power, water, or fire. AT ALL.
Massive amounts of people have their jobs and livelihood threatened. The datacenters, which are enabling that, are being deployed in their neighborhoods while everyone in that neighborhood goes jobless. There is no plan of relief in the form of better economic policy, UBI, less taxation of actual humans, or anything else. That is the real crux of what is being fought.
I’ve noticed that people conflate being anti data center with being anti AI.
I don’t have any faith in the current crop of gen AI. I think it’s junk. I don’t think it’s replacing humans in drives. I can barely get it to refactor Sass code into a mixin.
Even if the AI bubble pops the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers.
If a speculator wants to create a bunch of construction jobs, build a site in a region with the power, water, climate to do so responsibly, and give us a bunch of money in property taxes. I’m for it.
I don’t care if his company folds and he loses his shirt. Someone will operate the data center.
They can’t get back the money they injected into the community during construction.
It's junk for mission-critical software. But stock photographers, tutors, therapists, writers, translators, designers, and others are being replaced in droves. The snowball is starting.
Even plumbers. AI told me what to buy from Home Depot and I diagnosed and fixed my last 2 plumbing problems myself.
And lawyers. I fought some minor issues on my own with AI guidance.
What a bad idea AI therapy is and I don’t know too many people who are using AI art commercially. Translators, sure. But we’ve been using Google Translate for almost two decades now.
You didn’t need AI for your plumbing. My dad had a whole set of books on household chores that we used to fix everything.
I do more of the work around my house than most. I won’t touch tall trees to fuck with my breaker box. I do most of my own plumbing.
But, plumbers are fine. Most people don’t want to handle their own shit.
People will use it, because they don't have money for real therapists, because they also lost their own job. Maybe you can give them free therapy if you think it's a bad idea?
> I don’t know too many people who are using AI art commercially
I see AI stock images absolutely everywhere in the news now, AI portraits all over the place, AI relit product images absolutely everywhere.
> You didn’t need AI for your plumbing. My dad had a whole set of books on household chores
I don't have time to read books when I have a plumbing issue and other shit to do. Normally I'd have paid $200 for a plumber. But with AI I didn't have to read the books, and I was able to solve it myself for $30.
I think current gen AI is junk. I don’t use it. I also don’t see mass job losses over it. Scapegoated? Yes. Actual mass unemployment? No.
Commercially, I typically see AI used in what amount to scams. And no, I don’t believe that anyone should be using it for therapy.
You don’t have time to glance at a diagram in a book but you have time to ask AI and go to Home Depot and do it yourself?
If you’re worried about job loss, pay the plumber. No one forced you to ask AI and do it yourself. You could argue that you still put money into the local economy by shopping locally. The money you saved can be spent on dinner and ice cream. Money is fungible.
It’s been a few hours. I’ve said all I have to say under this post. I’m going to stop replying now.
You're not wrong that the position of many anti-datacenter people isn't entirely rational (in the sense of "backed by solid numbers"), but you're entirely missing the point of why they are angry.
Consider this:
- People are struggling more and more financially, with income that does not keep up with inflation
- People are seeing inequality rise with the ultra-rich getting ultra-richer
- People are seeing climate change quickly changing their environment for the worst: droughts, heatwaves, storms...
- People are expecting climate change to make their financial prospect worse, too
And now, they see a wave of building datacenters. Not only do these data centers have externalities for the climate, but their _purpose_ seems like a negative: putting their jobs at risk because AI, redirecting this wealth to the ultra-rich. There's nothing for them in this, it's lose-lose!
And they see their own government encouraging and subsidising these projects, how could they not feel betrayed?
> People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”.
I don't think so. People would rather these benefits weren't there, but people exist in society and balance principle with practicality. You're allowed to criticise how AI is being brought into society while also using AI yourself, moral purity isn't a requirement to having opinions.
Hell, I don’t even use gen AI, I still think it’s unreliable junk.
However, most of the things that the people in my community are concerned about don’t apply to our region specifically. We’re actually in a position to benefit GREATLY. It’s useful to have that conversation.
Property taxes. Construction jobs. The land is unused and already had tax incentives. Remember, tax incentives don’t eliminate taxes, they just reduce them for a period of time to encourage development.
2008 is apples vs oranges. The proposed data center site is across the street from the dump, just south of the airport. It’s zoned for heavy industrial use.
Literally anything that they could build there other than a data center would have a greater negative impact on the environment and a far less positive economic impact.
One refrigerator sized rack at a datacenter takes as much power as 150 homes, and they’re using it for technology that disempowers and annoys people. It’s pretty obviously offensive.
Nobody's shutting off those 150 homes to take their electricity, though. They have to buy it themselves. Lots of industrial things take tons of energy, from metal smelting to food production.
Oh, and datacenters alone shouldn't even make electricity more expensive, because rates are regulated. The state regulators have to approve rate raises. Now, are the regulators a bunch of stooges captured by the utilities who always do their bidding? Probably! But that's a good reason to throw your corrupt state politicians out of office and hopefully run them out of town on a rail -- not to protest datacenters.
> One refrigerator sized rack at a datacenter takes as much power as 150 homes
Is this supposed to scare me or something? I can't even fathom the actual point you are trying to make if it doesn't involve me having an emotional response to this statement.
Seems pretty obvious- that datacenters very measurably contribute to rising costs of electricity and climate change , and unlike aluminum processing or farming which makes things people want, is used for AI which a lot of people resent. It’s a lose-lose
> datacenters very measurably contribute to rising costs of electricity and climate change
the people who make this true are the same people who oppose the data centers. if they just let people build solar and data centers neither of those things would be true.
That’s not the core of the argument. You know that.
I’m putting things into perspective for people who are terrified that the last drops of their potable water and going to be used to generate a meme video.
But in PJM they are almost entirely being powered by natural gas and coal? Even if you contract out power from a nuclear plant some other plant on the grid is now enjoying a higher capacity factor, at the margin natural gas.
The data center in question in Utah was marketed as a 9GW full build out natural gas facility more than twice the electrical generation of the entire state. Coal electrical production in the US increased 13% last year.
I don’t defend every data center everywhere. I’m talking about the proposed data center about 11 miles from my door.
In my area we have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from that site. It sells 80-85% of all power generate wholesale to other markets. We have the power infrastructure here.
The amount of nuclear generation is roughly fixed (minus the refurbishment of three mile) in that region. If you add additional large load to the grid and outbid other demand for that power you are just shifting the load you replaced to other sources, which in PJM region would be mostly gas (new or existing) and delaying the decommissioning of existing base load coal plants. Renewables in that region are unfortunately a small percent of electrical generation.
I do agree that other demands like water consumption are overblown and could be largely regulated to enforce best practices. What infrastructure we are building as a society to meet this load demand is going to be the lasting impact of this generational infrastructure investment and it's looking like that will be mostly fossil fuel based in the near to mid term.
It is much more than the Colossus sites, I would look at the capacity additions in the regional grids you are apart of and what is being funded to meet these increases in demand from data centers. The majority of it is natural gas generation and a sizeable but minority amount of battery storage. Just outbidding people for a relatively fixed amount of clean nuclear ignores the second order effects of adding large loads like these. What happens in your area does have larger impacts.
Again, I’m talking about my region. We have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from the proposed site of the data center. That station sells 80-85% of the power generated wholesale to other parts of the state and grids regionally.
The nuclear generating station is part of a larger system. Say you build enough data centers in your local area to use up all the station power so that 80% is no longer exported, what is getting built somewhere else to make up for that missing generation the data centers now use? Its not new nuclear. When you add data center load to a grid how the additional generation is supplied is really what matters in terms of impacts.
We should have been building additional nuclear capacity for the past 50 years. The kinds of anti data center activism we’re seeing now was directed at nuclear back then.
It would take decades to build enough data centers to use 100% of the station’s capacity.
We can build capacity as we build consumers. It’s all about balance.
I also don’t believe that we’re going to be building all of the 1200 proposed data centers in the US.
Being next to a nuclear power plant but attached to a regional grid is irrelevant in terms of additive emissions from a data center build out. Companies are incentivized to care about disclosing a narrow boundary view of scope 2 emissions but we live in the real world not a spreadsheet.
In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers. I'm sure there are market failures going on here in many places but it's not necessarily the case that you and the companies be on opposing sides. There are positive-sum solutions to a lot of these problems, if people are willing to consider them.
The problem is that we don’t correctly price pollution: it’d be one thing if this boom meant acres of solar panels and wind turbines getting greenlit but in practice it means keeping some dirty plants online and building out new pollution capacity, sometimes completely illegally like what happened in Memphis.
All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
New is heavily solar, yes, but there’s still too much natural gas and the administration is deeply committed to returning the investment fossil fuel companies made in the president’s campaign so I wouldn’t bet on that continuing.
What’s more of a concern is coal being kept online just for data centers. Even if the national average drops, that’s a regional health risk where it happens.
> Just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line sits dozens of unpermitted gas turbines that power xAI’s Colossus 2 data center while releasing smog-forming pollution, soot, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde. The tech company set up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences.
being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.
for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.
so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.
effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
> In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers.
The same should apply to memory and GPU manufacturers and yet I have seen no commitments from them to increase supply, so the end result is that consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive compared to even just a year ago. That doesn't feel like a working economy to me.
This is an unusual comment to read because many manufacturers are public and therefore have released their expansion plans to shareholders (and therefore the public). Most recently, Micron is planning to build much more because their clients have made purchase agreements to 2030: https://www.aol.com/articles/micron-just-locked-100-billion-...
Don't all states have public utility commissions that regulate electricity provisioning? I don't know if the market has much to do with anything since it's all government regulation.
Data centers do more than AI. And you won’t defeat AI by killing data center proposals. The technology will succeed or fail on its own. We’ll find out in about 5 years.
Remember how “everyone” said all trucks will be self-driving in 10 years… 15 years ago?
There are something like 1200 data center proposals cross the US. How many of those will actually be built? How many are being proposed by speculators with no experience building or operating data centers? I have a feeling the number that will actually be built is significantly less that 1200.
It's already speeding up medical progress, so it'll probably take roughly however much time it takes for you to be personally affected by something that is currently incurable.
Thanks for the response, but unfortunately "common sense" is not a source.
And unfortunately, these aren't actual examples of medical progress being made. AI in some capacity is absolutely going to be helpful for medical research, but I'm still very skeptical LLMs are what is going to do it. I also do not think all the other BS coming with the current LLM wave outweighs the benefits. I think the reaction would be much different if these things weren't conflated, and if the focus of AI was towards things like medical research. As it stands, it comes off more as a coping mechanism / excuse that I do not think is convincing for most people when they see the majority of AI is used for garbage (to put it lightly).
They are literal proof of medical progress being made by LLMs. Luckily, your skepticism carries no weight. The applications of LLMs are incredibly wide because it is an incredibly important technology that has evolved its way to where it is from machine learning research that has been ongoing since the 1940's. That's why all of the robber barons are doing all of the typical robber baron things that they always do when a world-changing technology that everybody is going to be using comes along.
The thing is that YOU can actually choose what to focus on at any time. You have clearly chosen to not focus on the STEM work being bolstered by LLMs that will accelerate as the technology does, to a degree in which I literally linked you research papers that support my claim and you hand-waved them away because they are in direct conflict with your preconceived notions.
If it is your belief that AI isn't useful, then as an engineer using LLMs daily, your opinion is laughably uninformed or you perhaps haven't used LLMs since forming it. I also don't understand how anyone can use LLMs extensively and believe that their job is in jeopardy. They cannot reason like a human and they absolutely require a human to pilot them. If people are losing their jobs to LLMs, then blame the follow-the-leader CSuite morons who don't understand the technology as much as you don't, and not the technology.
Tech bros whether they realize it or not are living a philosophy of fear. They say: in order for YOU to be healthy and safe, we should be allowed to trample THEM (the undesirables), because trust us, the end result will be worth it.
Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?
They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.
And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.
I've been an indie filmmaker since I was a teenager. Seedance 2.0 and all of the image and video models are such an amazing gift to use. The things you can push these models to do are incredible. I have a full VFX workbench. I can rotoscope, I can pull off effects shots. I can even use these things to articulate non-shotlist things for meetings. It's incredible. The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
I've professionally been a systems engineer. Five/six nines reliable services that move billions of dollars, etc. I have fallen in love with coding models. I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling. The job we're all in is to provide value - these models are the next generation of compilers. We're working at higher and higher levels of abstraction, and it's brilliant. For those of us who can operate at all of the levels, it's a super power.
I will not go back to pre-AI times. I want to see what things are like in 10, 20 years. When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs, where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast, where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
This is the most excited about tech I've ever been. This is so much better than smartphone incrementalism and stupid web platforms.
Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds. This is literally the jetpack future we were promised growing up. It's the coolest thing since the internet.
I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.
I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.
> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
One of the supposed benefits of true self driving cars is that you never have to find parking near where you're going ever again. Get out, send your car off to park somewhere 5 miles away.
No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.
And now discovery is becoming exponentially harder, because every niche can get flooded with AI slop by companies trying to extract profits from real people's creativity.
Even if you use these tools to create something amazing, what keeps hundreds of variations "inspired by, but totally not copied" of your creative work from popping up? As these models get cheaper and more powerful, this issue will only get worse and worse.
There is a fundamental difference between those technologies and generative AI. I ask again: what stops companies from creating literally dozens, hundreds or thousands of copies of any creative work you publish? Why shouldn't they create AI artists that copy small artists in a "legally distinct" manner, and at a volume that drowns them out?
As these models get better and better, the only limiting factor is the available compute. Meanwhile data centers are being built like there's no tomorrow.
Okay, now produce something meaningfully more appealing than everyone else with the same tools - when you do that, then you have the start of a leg to stand on to claim that it’s worth the cost to everyone.
The cost argument is wrong. Compare Gemini 2.5 Pro to Gemma 4 31B.
Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.
Except no one will be able to afford those laptops. The hyperscalers will buy up literally all the RAM and high power GPUs. So you'll be stuck with 8GB of unified memory on anything affordable. A laptop of better capability will cost 50% more than today (at least). That won't be your biggest problem because some C-suite goon with stars in their eyes laid you off because of AI.
If you only ever want frontier model performance then sure, you have to pay to play. But as it is now with open models, some of which I can even run from my gaming PC at home, we're only about 6 months behind frontier performance. Even when the money starts drying up for those at the forefront, the genie is out of the bottle.
And yet, the productivity increases with existing models are meh (ie not 0 but certainly not worth what is being spent) based on the data. Enjoy the tulips while they bloom.
Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says - https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")
Productivity is typically a broader scale measure against the economy. I 100% agree that the shoehorned adoption of AI into general company processes is more of a negative than a positive. Most people here would agree that AI has only really affected productivity positively in the past 6 months-1 year. So obviously there wont be much general uplift across all industries yet, and obviously that would mean there's not really enough data to go off of empirically yet.
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
With the most politeness I can muster, show me the data. “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” If the data doesn't exist supporting the productivity improvement assertion, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And that's why I pivoted at the beginning of this year to LocalLLMs.
I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.
When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.
> The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.
I wouldn't. They'll just handle it differently than we would in the US.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/unemployment-rate - It's around 5% per this (and some other sources I found, just linking the one). The population being around 1.4 billion people, that means around 70 million unemployed. That is already mass unemployment despite having a low rate of unemployment across their national population. And that's before getting to their youth unemployment rate which is around 15%, which sets them up poorly for the future.
> In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
What the comments fail to point out (and I haven't read the article to find out if they address it): the number of data centers being built is based on speculation of need and is a dramatic over-estimate. It has to be. What, other than AI has happened in the last few years that would warrant that many new data centers? How do they know there will be customers for that capacity? There will not be advances in algorithms, etc that do AI much more efficiently? (We know China is making strides in that!)
It's complete speculation! It's the new gold rush and everyone wants a data center. Most of these data centers might not even be built! And the ones that are, might never make any profit.
The rhetoric around AI has been insane for years now. AI will kill us all. AI will take all our jobs. SaaS is dead. AI is too dangerous to even release.
It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.
But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.
wow, that’s crazy that OpenAI is saying that negative opinion against them is actually a nefarious foreign conspiracy, and does not actually indicate people hate them
Honestly, voter backlash occurs for every reason. Build more homes? Backlash. Build more wind? Backlash. Build more solar? Backlash. Build more geothermal? Backlash. Build more urban subway? Backlash. Build high-speed rail? Backlash. What I can conclude from this is that what is right to do and what voter backlash occurs in is orthogonal. I think it is right that we build all these things and more nuclear power, and more residential super towers, and more datacenters, and the other things for the same reason we climb the mountains, fly the Atlantic, and Rice plays Texas.
Agreed. Change makes people uncomfortable. The nature of the change doesn't matter; the transition itself is the root of the discomfort.
When things are stagnant, we gradually optimize our lives towards a low energy state and overfit to our exact circumstances. When a change in circumstances reveals past optimizations to be wasted work, it kick-starts the four stages of grief over the loss of that low energy state.
It's not really about AI, data centers, water consumption, or energy. Those are real issues. But I don't think that's what gets people so riled up.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.
I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
> AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately.
Source?
Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
> Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not
I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
> All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
Then you should have no problem pointing to concrete examples of how it's actually improved life for the average person.
> I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
If you want to describe anyone with any education as an "elite", go ahead, but it's not convincing and is pretty anti-intellectual.
I sure am glad I'm apparently an elite and didn't know it, though! Who knew being an elite means you're barely able to make rent, will never be able to afford having children, have to forgo medical care due to the costs involved, and would be homeless within a few months if you got laid off?
This is a pretty predictable reaction to the underhanded tactics being used to try to force these projects through either before citizens know they're happening and often, when citizens are aware, against their will.
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
You get the same vigor against all of those project all the time. Windmills, solar, nuclear, rail, etc. There's a stronger will to oppose than to build.
We do muster this kind of vigor. The problem is that coverage decisions shaped by negativity bias ensure you're much more likely to hear about the projects people don't like. Did you hear about the huge New Mexico wind farm, largest in the US to date, that came online two weeks ago?
That's true, but I also see a lot of infrastructure projects that get gummed up or even canceled by NIMBYs, industry incumbents, and general obstructionism that would've happened had they been undertaken with the same bull-in-china-shop approach these datacenter projects tend to take.
This goes to every LinkedIn brain idiot spouting recycled nonsense about the new Industrial Revolution and that white collar jobs are going away. These blabbering idiots never read a story book to understand the time period, that people displaced by industrialization were uneducated illiterate farm workers in a period in time before democracy.
Jump today most countries stable enough to build infrastructure are democracies and the white collar people you are demonizing do vote and that immense investment in infrastructure is not really easy to relocate.
even if datacenters aren't good for the communities there are in, it would be much worse if China advances in AI faster.
this is one of the core flaws in democracy, while the popularity contest generally curbs blatant abuse (also note how even that fails miserably when the electorate groups start to hate each other), the vast majority of people have no real way to judge the impacts of non-trivial decisions and judgement doesn't even need to come with certainty, just knowing which risks are worth it. voters will never get it right.
and in the information age, democratic sabotage is many times easier than informing a public that in most cases has no interest in being informed when the group think/herd instincts are triggered.
i suspect democracy only worked well thus far because it was never truly real. media was always concentrated and there were no non-democratic peers. this is no longer the case. when the media was concentrated democracy was just an emergent properly of media dynamics. now it's chaotic and subject to external targeted perturbation.
I think China "advancing" faster is better. Hoarding some magic numbers on a hard drive isn't a sound business plan, and shouldn't be what we're betting the farm (literally) on.
No other technology gets as much hatred as AI is getting as the public see that as a threat to their own jobs.
Of course techies here are having trouble understanding this backlash. Maybe they should read up a bit on the Unabomber Manifesto to draw parallels on the motivations of the awful attacks against CEOs recently.
Just like crypto, you cannot use it to solve social problems with technical solutions. The same goes for AI as it still requires humans and trust to use it effectively.
The more AI data centers
get built, the more it is hated and the worse society gets with this loss of trust as more people read about more mass layoffs.
The US needs to build out energy infra like China, already >2x more total generation capacity (~1/3 of world total). Putting data centers aside, if America wants to bring manufacturing back, it will need energy to build things. RE: data centers, we do need to be more mindful of where they go and the resources they consume. We should force them to use water efficient cooling (more expensive for them) and support the buildout of the required energy gen. Utah does not seem an appropriate place for such a large data center.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
All people (should) have the right to vote. If you don't like they way they vote, persuade them. This culture of political domination is at the core of our issues.
I know I’ll get downvoted into oblivion but I can’t help but think data center and ai backlash manufactured or is a psi-ops campaign by Russia or China
It doesn’t make any sense to me as the externalities are future not current and at no other point in time has the public cared about the future without first seeing concrete examples of harm. That hasn’t happened yet for data centers nor AI. It’s all “if, maybe, sometime in the future”
People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. So it feels like people are stirring the pot. like if not Russia or China then just influencers doing it for rage bait for likes and subscribes
I’m not saying they are wrong, I can’t predict the future, I’m only saying it feels unusual for the reasons mentioned above
Almost every major issue has bot networks from hostile countries playing both sides of any issue to intentionally cause chaos. I completely agree that russia, china, or some other country is fomenting anger here.
That and the other issues aside, I think AI companies have done this to themselves. They've gone around talking about replacing all human labor and becoming the companies that control robot god's that swallow the entire economy and put everyone out of work and might destroy man kind. Well saying that is gonna make people hate them and that will find an outlet somewhere
so what makes you think that you aren't responding to a bot intending to sway your opinion by giving a shape to your preconceived notions so that your position crystallizes further, right now?
From folks I've talked to in real life, it really does seem that way. They're getting their information from Facebook but it's mixed in with the "5G towers are killing all the bees" and the usual anti-vaccine rhetoric. Seeing that erin brockovich has jumped on the anti-data center bandwagon makes it even more suspicious to me.
What is so objectionable about data centers anyway? That they consume utilities without employing a substantial amount of people? Compared to actual manufacturing like fabs the pollution concerns are laughable. The water use issue seems to be a wedge.
I live in an area built on paper mills. Our rivers are trashed from the paper mills. It smells bad in areas because of paper mills. Paper mills use a lot of electricity. But people are absolutely losing their minds over the pollution from proposed data centers. I'm not sure there's a cleaner industry in existence.
I've never seen the level of anti-scientific, straight misinformation as I have with data centers. I genuinely think it's to the point where the antivaxxers have a stronger scientific backing for their stance.
It did not feel organic at all. It's to the point now where that initial seeding of ideas has gained legitimate traction, but the initial burst of anti-datacenter content was wild to see in real time.
Generally, I'm glad that "the people" appear to be pointed in the IMHO correct direction, even if for imprecise, or maybe even wrong, reasons.
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists. It cross-cuts against the old and outdated political compass.
Neo-luddites are usually the educated elite and genealogy is from old green or left politics but includes nationalists and social conservatives.
I think media is broadly failing to recognise this new clan.
The current far right government/movement (aka conservatives) is far more in favor of AI than people opposed to them. You seem to be labeling just about everything as the opposite of what it actually is. Are you invested in or working at an AI company?
I think your view is too simplistic and falls easily into the populist narrative so you end up mislabelling me as being invested.
You are again doing the thing I flagged in my original comment - the left right or progressive/conservative axis is not useful anymore. As an example: a lot of tech CEO's were originally against Trump but ended up caving precisely because the left became anti-technology broadly.
From experience and anecdotes, tech and AI optimism cross cuts into the old axis. Examples
1. third world countries are way more optimistic about AI than first world
2. many celebs (for the lack of better word) are pro AI - look at Redis, Django, NodeJS, Github
3. the existence of Effective Altruism itself should prove that this axis is useless - EA was largely leftist and support democrats while also being "pro" AI like Anthropic is mostly made from the EA cult
The nomenclature also doesn't make sense to me. Why would conservatives not conserve but rather push for progress? What are conservatives conserving instead? The academic consensus is that technology determines the societal culture and if conservatives wanted to conserve anything, they would conserve technology first wouldn't they?
None of this changes the fact that average people aren't elites, no matter how much you may try to spin it that way.
And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite
and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
You think there's a binary of elites vs non elites which is using a Marxist framework that I (and almost mainstream academic) would reject.
> And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
Thanks for proving my point, you are emphasising the exact divide I was trying to show originally. You may try to twist the rhetoric to show that you are for slow and cautionary progress of tech. That's sensible and I don't mean to claim neo-luddites would outright deny progress itself.
> This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists.
When I look at the total number of acres in a state and the number that may get taken up by a data center… not that we should even have to look at this spec but still not sure why people are so focused on data center construction as an issue unless it’s literally going to be next to your house, is there anything more than FUD going on here? And perhaps people taking advantage of it specifically as a talking point given election season.
You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
I think part of it is the perception that real environmental and public health damage is being done for totally trivial and indefensible causes. A data center is not like an airplane parts manufacturer, which has lots of ugly pollution but provides a necessary national service. Most people use generative AI recreationally, and the productivity gains among white-collar workers are awfully ephemeral. And if you're less pessimistic about the economics of generative AI... that makes it worse!
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
When people hear datacenter they think ai-almost universally subsidies by the many for the few. They drive up electrical costs, increase carbon emissions, and are designed to make money by stealing and repackaging the fruit of human labor and thought, with the goal of ultimately replacing it not for the benefit of all, but for the benefit of the owners of that datacenter.
> the Stratos development would have spanned tens of thousands of acres in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley. The project would ultimately require up to 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters.
I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
The problem is not the center per se. The problem is the power. And, all too often they make up for the lack of utility capacity by putting in their own noisy generators.
Datacenters are a hedge the investor class is pushing and it's not really needed.
Once you realize:
1) LLM = CPU
2) Session Context = L1, L2, L3, CPU Cache
the entire AI industry is operating within the CPU cache of the LLM provider this is why cost moves quadratically, increases noise - signal ration, regenerative feedback loop, it dilutes the user narration, and it actually creates an architectural induce hallucination.
We've literally solved this problem in the 1960's with a memory architecture:
the OS has a memory controller, tasked with taking data from persistant structure storage (HD) loading into CPU Cache and the CPU computers, the output is stored in RAM and then moved into HD.
this is required on all AI applications, what the industry has done, is supplement a RAG which is summarizing context, however the entire context summarized chain is still being processed by the LLM.
if you employ a well sustain memory architecture you can retrieve the context you only need to feed to the llm. reduce token cost and then reduce energy therefore less demand of datacenters.
I can tell you, based on local examples, that politicians are setting up deals to bring in data centers without trying to build community support first. Not only that, they are often signing NDAs that prohibit them from telling voters what they have agreed to. It's no way to operate in a democracy, and voters are right to be angry.
I’m a voter who prefers we establish rules that be followed rather than encumber every project with a lengthy community dialogue.
These companies aren't coming in, buying property at market rates, and developing it with existing infrastructure under current zoning laws. They usually want tax breaks, major infrastructure changes, and other accommodations and guarantees. It's completely reasonable for people to want a dialog with their representatives before those kinds of arrangements are made with a company on their behalf. And it's entirely reasonable for them to vote out reps that are overly accommodating.
I live in an historic district. I had to attend a public meeting a couple years ago to get approval to change a lamp post. It is perfectly reasonable to ask tech companies to show up and defend massive projects to the public.
A meeting to get a lamp post change is exactly how progress stops. It is why we can't build anything in US and it costs a billion dollars per mile of high speed rail.
A data centre isn't a lamp post.
That's it right there. Rules, not deals.
The two are often difficult to dissociate. My town had a fairly fractious town meeting around a rezoning proposal that was mostly for a fairly specific commercial purpose--that passed through a basically procedural mechanism in a second meeting.
I was living in a touristic area.
Guess what was happening, local politicians were treating long term residents as trash in the face of big hotels/apartments who had loads of money.
Fun part was that those apartments/hotels wouldn’t hire locals but rather people who would drive like 20-30 km away.
Bad deal all way round for locals but of course local government people would pocket their share one way or the other if not from outright bribery.
You live in a touristy area because you have a tourism-related job, right?
Because where are the tourists supposed to stay if there's no hotels?
Not really. I was just born there and it wasn’t as touristy when I was a child. It blew up as touristy place when I was a teenager and in my twenties.
My parents had odd jobs, construction, chemical processing operations. There was some small scale industry running there as well but it went bust when people wanted fresh air for tourism. Even if the industry was really small scale for marketing sake local government got rid of all of it.
I also don’t live there anymore as I wrote „I was living in a touristy area”.
If I would stay there, there was no future for me there.
Ok so your childhood home became more touristy and you're trying to blame somebody for that. I don't think that works though.
Well not really. I couldn’t care less. I would move out anyway.
I just have seen firsthand how people who claim to be „for the local community” on the posters when it is election time — doing exactly the opposite otherwise.
You need to take a break from the keyboard. You're being an asshole.
Sorry but the hotels didn't do anything wrong. If I'm an asshole for pointing that our, I can live with that.
The guidelines ask that curious conversation be pursued, drilling into straw guesses about fellow commenters motivations be eschewed.
~ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlOr, he did something else and mived away, vecause this sucked.
There is never shortage of hotels. They pop up is actual econony supports it. No reason to take bribes
For anyone who was poor in that area it was better to move out.
Are those NDAs enforceable? That’s a major governance gap and problem if so.
Some information is legally required for them to disclose, if they’re acting in their official capacity. I feel like development on public land is too big to hide.
Voters also have a right not to be misinformed by Chinese government propaganda: https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...
OpenAI isn't a convincing source. Of course they're going to blame everything on someone else. They don't want to acknowledge the very real hate for AI that people have. It's also extremely likely that they themselves are involved in the very same thing but to push AI instead.
The next time someone calls me an asshole I’m going to blame Chinese propaganda. Surely it’s that and not my personality.
Do you consider the American fight for Civil rights to have been motivated by Nazi (or Soviet) propaganda? Would one's opposition to the Nazis preclude them from supporting Civil Rights based on some truth exploited by Nazi propagandist?
1. https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/german-leaflet-for-black...
And on the other side this is the foreign adversarial way to hinder US AI progress, develop and encourage anti-datacenter sentiment which this kind of secrecy and antidemocratic behavior plays right into.
Is it really a matter of "national security" when the technology at hand is being used in a way that unilaterally benefits a small class of oligarchs at the expense of the rest of society? That's not really in the benefit of the nation anymore, is it?
Depends on what you think "the nation" is. Is it the "regular people"? Or is it the elite? (And whichever you think it is, and no matter how obvious you think it is, there are people who think it is obviously the opposite.)
There's practically nothing you can get 100% agreement on, and yet we can still find that there is a right answer.
I don't understand why people think they should be able to vote on things like this. Especially when they lack the necessary credentials to have an informed opinion on it.
So what are the topics people should be able to vote on? I don't think people have the necessary credentials to vote on immigration, drug price regulation, social media regulation? Why let people vote at all, they don't know anything apparently.
I mean, why do we let people without property vote in the first place? It's really only people with a vested interest who have something at stake.
> I can tell you, based on local examples, that politicians are setting up deals to bring in data centers without trying to build community support first. Not only that, they are often signing NDAs that prohibit them from telling voters what they have agreed to. It's no way to operate in a democracy, and voters are right to be angry.
People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood that involves non-public land just doesnt make any sense to me.
Why do people think that because they have a house somewhere they should get the ability to freeze an entire town in time and disallow anyone to build anything. Seriously, where did this mindset come from?
This may come as a surprise to you, but people like living in pleasant surroundings.
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.
The next town over from where I live has basically no rules. No zoning, if you want to turn your property into a junkyard go right ahead! Even still, people are successfully fighting against a trash company putting in a landfill. I believe the lever they're pulling is a state wetlands permit. The system is working.
So many of these conversations come back to the problem of privatized gains and socialized losses.
Most things that create value have externalities. I kill the moss on my roof, then it rains and the chemicals go into the stream, then you try to go fishing and get skunked. I exerted my freedom as a private property owner and got the benefits; you paid for the drawbacks. We're all pulling from the same pile of resources, and the Earth doesn't care where your picket fence is.
Data centers incur expensive externalities and you're asking the general public to bear those costs -- or "pay those taxes," if that resonates more. I suppose NIMBYism is part of it, but we're not talking about ugly condos here, we're talking about towns running out of electricity: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-....
Your argument makes sense until you have a horrible neighbor. You can see it in action in a state like Montana which to my knowledge prohibits housing covenants. Want to park 12 cars that are rusting in your front yard? Do it! Neighbors can't do anything about it. But that does have the effect of lowering property value and degrading the neighborhood.
You may be confusing Montana with a much-worse place.
Or confusing with State law preventing homeowners' associations (HOAs) from enforcing new covenants that restrict the use of your property, compared to what was allowed when you originally purchased it.
There is a WILD difference between commercial properties coming in to residential areas and a neighbor with rusty cars.
I'll happily live next to rusty car guy. I would rather eat glass than have to live near a data center.
NIMBYism has been popular for a long time. People really do want datacenters (or at least, the things that having datacenters enable).. they just want them somewhere else.
I'm not sure anyone but investors chasing yield feel a very strong need to see the planet covered in AI data centers, especially when the benefits seem to be rolling up, not down.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood that involves non-public land just doesnt make any sense to me.
Would you like me to buy the lot next to your house and set up a 3000W sound system pumping noise music 24 hours directly at your bedroom? Because that's what you're arguing for.
Generally the law concerning this is called: “disturbing the peace” and is not tolerated.
But the noise from a data center is exempt. And if their water use exhausts the local aquifer, too bad for the locals.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property
Yes, I believe that’s called “society” and while we are all very disappointed about your personal liberties I’m afraid some compromises had to be made to allow people other than you to have property rights too.
Amen, NIMBYs have ruined this country. Abolish zoning laws and nuke the suburbs, yeeclaw!
Strong private property rights have to come with some protections against others' externalities - otherwise your property is harmed.
Are you from Texas? Because Texas is what you get with a policy like that.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property
If the data center existed in a vaccum, with no inputs or outputs, this argument would hold some weight.
Instead, they stress limited water supplies, cause power shortages, increase GHG emissions (which we, the public ultimately have to pay for, either through mitigation or dealing with the damage after the fact).
Oh, and also they may well have negative externalities to employment. They definitely have negative externalities to communication, the internet has been flooded with AIshit.
> People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood
So... iron smeltery next door for you then? Acid rain?
Come on. There is reasonable concern for property rights and civil coexistence and then there's Randian Libertarian Claptrap, and you've hopped right into the deep end.
YES, government has a clear and obvious interest, as a matter of principle, in the regulation of land use and development. This doesn't change just because you think the government made a wrong decision in a particular instance. The solution is to fix the government. Go vote for datacenter candidates. Seems like no one else is.
Just tax acid rain byproduct
A few months ago the founders of the top AI companies walked into Capitol Hill. Tried to explain to a room full of elected representatives exactly how their technology was going to put almost half the working population into under/unemployment and they should consider UBI [0]. Then they went back to the airport, got on their corporate jets, and went home secure in the knowledge that they really showed them. That they were the smartest people in the room.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.
* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems
* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.
* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.
I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
I think it's a fool's errand to believe populaces resist data centers, or take up issues in general, for any of the rational reasons you listed. It's propaganda using m legacy/social media to fuel movements. The only question is who the propaganda is from. The boogeyman guess would be China but i honestly have no clue. Either way, when you engage most of those against data centers, their positions are generally baseless (not that the anti data center movement is without merit - its just most of the movement is not in it due to rationality or logic)
> I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.
I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.
Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.
I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.
> ... refused to answer ...
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
Construction jobs, yes. After that, a skeleton crew and a bunch of people in far off places, possibly outside the country.
So? Since when is there a floor for the number of jobs a business has to create? Suzies Tanning Salon uses a lot of energy but only employs 3 people.
So maybe 50kW for 10 hours a day? Double it and call it 1Mwh a day.
A 1GW DC would have to employ 75,000 people if that’s an acceptable ratio.
> They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area.
The answer to that is so obviously "no" that I wonder how much attention they've been paying.
The people doing the voting are mostly talking about how much water datacenters supposedly use.
More electricity than water around here—rates going up gets everyone’s attention—but there’s nothing supposedly about the water use: data centers don’t consume the water permanently but they still put stress on systems which weren’t designed for the extra volume, pushing requests for expensive expansion projects, and there can be other problems: a colleague mentioned his family back home recently learned that the extra water circulation was spreading a groundwater pollution plume substantially faster, affecting well water users in the area. Since these things tend not to contribute many jobs, there isn’t much to balance out the bad news for communities.
I have zero faith in the current generation of gen AI. I think the claims are overblown and the odds of massive unemployment is near zero.
Even if the AI bubble pops, the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers. I don’t care if a data center developer/speculator loses their shirt. The data center will stand long after they fold and someone will operate it.
Build it here. Create the construction jobs. Collect the property taxes.
Eat while there’s food.
When the AI bubble pops. It will, and it will be glorious.
Most people I know (in Utah) are predominantly concerned with the pollution and water use. Water is the most ubiquitous concern across politics in Utah. No matter what political ideology you adhere to, water rights and water conservation are a core topic. If you watch local news for more than an hour or two, you will see propaganda to "slow the flow". One of the most common criticisms of our Governor is that he publicly prays for rain, while using an incredible amount of water on his own alfalfa farms.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
Why is water so inexpensive? Shouldn’t the price per gallon increase exponentially? It seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult to come up with curves so that typical households pay very little for water and the big users pay a lot for water.
Rare mormon W
I'm local-ish to Box Elder county in Utah, here people absolutely give a shit about the environmental burden to the region. It isn't just about water consumption, but other things. I think the "We need to win China is AI" narrative is (appropriately???) falling of deaf ears. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but even lay-people in my circles have asked how these alleged AI_driven benefits (fighting cancer, stopping climate change, and whatever) are really going to come to fruition, when what they really observe in their backyards are data centers being generated so we can fill our lives with AI slop.
Box elder is particularly egregious. 9GW of new natural gas burning power concentrated in 1 location in a state that already suffers from poor air quality.
Indeed. Our air is so bad we can't afford to open up more smoke stacks. Of course Kevin doesn't care because he's in Canada.
(I'm also in Utah)
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
Plenty of people care about their power bill. Water in some regions is a hot political issue. Data centers don’t create jobs of course, we don’t need anyone to answer that.
"Some regions" being a a bit of an understatement, the US west and southwest are experiencing (or about to experience) severe water shortages and disruption due to the current water shortages.
Lake Mead is projected next year to be at its lowest level since it was filled by the creation of Hoover Dam. The states on the Colorado River have been fighting over the dwindling water for decades. Locals care about water.
Out here in the US southwest, we absolutely do care about water usage as well as the potential for higher electricity prices. We also care about jobs, which in the case of data centers are only going to be boosted temporarily until construction is finished.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
Why do people want to work if AI can do the job? What's up with the data center hate?
Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI? Why aren't more people demanding UBI instead of demonizing data centers? The corpus they are trained on belongs to humanity. It's humanity's data. The gains belong to all of us. Is it just American hatred of anything that seems socialist? Imagine if in the the optimistic sci fi stories someone interrupted to complain they wanted to unplug the AI so they could be the one to fill out the spreadsheets.
Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway? Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us? Why use government to turn off the spigot rather than redirect the flow?
The feds minimum wage is still $7.25, who is actually going to believe the government will implement UBI based on some vague and evasive answers about UBI?
We have a higher chance of the world ending than getting UBI in America. This is a country that can't even get basic universal healthcare going. Even if we did somehow get UBI, with who's controlling the country, there's almost no chance it wouldn't be abused to control people.
Losing your job means losing your livelihood and often your life for the vast majority of people.
That's not even getting into any loss of purpose or identity it might cause people. For better or for worse, working and jobs are a major part of the social fabric of society, and it would take a non-insignificant amount of time for that to change. Trying to abruptly shift that would not go well.
This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.
If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter? Is it even good policy beyond not wanting something in your own backyard?
> This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.
I don't see why you think that. Its something that:
1) These CEOs and people with power want
2) The populace has some degree of control over, since its local politics vs national.
That makes it an attractive way to push back against powerful people that they see as operating in bad faith. It seems like their chances here are much better than trying to go directly to congress and advocating for UBI.
This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people. A world in which you can actually stop the buildout is a world in which lobbying Congress is much easier.
You have control over who you vote for. Congress is not elected nationally. Sorry I just don't see how your points make sense. You might have better success of pushing the data centers off to your neighbor. But this doesn't stop the buildout, it only gives certain neighborhoods temporary protection while economic conditions for most continue to deteriorate. Aka a false sense of security and therefore a bad idea.
Your position pretty much sounds like "you can't stop it so why try" thus making it a "bad idea" which is really doesn't make any sense. Right now, they are attempting to build data centers in the worst possible places with issues such as not enough water supply, not enough energy and forcing the everyone in those communities to suffer. Clearly "forcing buildout to another area" is not a bad idea.
I'm not sure why this is relevant:
> This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people.
Its much easier to put someone who is aligned with your values into a local political position than congress. And its much more likely that your neighbors will vote in a way that aligns with your interests. And you won't get overridden by a congressman from several states away that has different incentives.
Yes, people building data centers can just shop for a new location. But resistance to data centers appears to be pretty correlated with living in communities that are good places to data center, at least anecdotally.
The world I'm looking in is one where citizens pushing back locally has seemed to get at least some measure of success, albeit spotty, whereas attempts to lobby Congress about AI has been screaming into the void. Frankly, I think your position here is completely divorced from what is actually happening in reality.
If the reality you believe in is one in which pockets of local resistance to data centers is going to meaningfully derail AI buildout across the country then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
It's a bad idea. The few communities that succeed are still going to suffer the macro consequences of data centers being built in the next town over.
I don't think anyone is expecting to seriously "derail AI" just by preventing data centers from being built in their neighborhood. But they can at least inconvenience the people they see as the perpetrators. If you can't win the fight, and can't walk away, at least you can give your opponent a bloody lip. And who knows, maybe it gets steam and the people in congress who have been actively ignoring them have incentives to at least throw them a bone.
If there were serious macro consequences then maybe it would be an issue but from the point of view of the communities -- there aren't. Data centers don't bring a lot of permanent employment and tend to be given tax breaks. They are skeptical that data centers are the boon that these people claim they are -- and they are right to be so since people pushing these data centers have been wildly untrustworthy at best.
Saying "You can't stop it so you might as well get on board and hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI" is going to go over like a lead brick. There's no reason to trust that UBI will come if you give up any leverage you have, even if it is a minuscule amount of leverage.
I appreciate your perspective. Just to be clear, I wasn't advocating one simply surrenders and "hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI".
I think I'm more curious why more serious advocacy of UBI itself isn't a major platform vs the things I hear often about data centers.
I think in some ways you have touched on that but also as your comment indicates perhaps as part of negotiations as things develop UBI will come more into the forefront. I just see a lot of national politics also around data centers but relatively few on UBI. Again, if you agree that at best this is an "inconvenience" to the status quo then I would think you would also share my surprise or maybe hope that stronger voices should emerge promoting a more sustainable solution - aka UBI.
Sometimes it feels like data centers are just a distraction from that more far reaching and yet necessary conversation. Perhaps it is simply a prelude. Thanks for the discussion.
No. When congress creates pro-average-person lawe right wing captures supreme court rewrites them into recognisable.
And then the same court creates the "conservatives win you loose" set of made up bogus rules.
> If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter?
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question? Yes, it is incomprehensibly harder to fundamentally change the fabric and structure of society, especially in a way that involves giving "free" money to people, than it is to prevent something from being built.
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question?
Trying to control something by merely protecting your own backyard never works. America has reinvented its own social contract many times, it's why we are still here 250 years later. What side would you have been on in the lead up to the civil war? The nothing ever happens side? Or civil rights? Or the New Deal? The world wars?
America has changed profoundly since the founding. Yes change is hard. So is a nation surviving for 250 years. The point is why politically agitate for a mid outcome. American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature. Have you read the founding documents? I mean I don't mean to be rude.
Okay, Jeb Bartlett, that's a nice speech, but you're suggesting that real people need to all get on board a platform which doesn't even have enough appeal to get a plurality of everyday voters supporting it[1], and should maybe even be prepared to fight a literal civil war(?) in the hopes that minority will prevail.
> American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature.
That part I agree with, though I would say maybe 'fantasy-based' may be better descriptor than 'aspirational' at present. Democrats for example think making a few billionaire sell their yachts would pay for universal healthcare forever (when current Medicare just for old people alone costs 1,118,000,000,000 a year), and Republicans think we can ban abortion and then no one will have anymore abortions.
[1] 45% support for a measly $1000 UBI in 2020 - a time that arguably was the best shot at people considering it! https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...
Relying on polls is a lame argument. Kamala Harris should be president I guess. The people yearn for Liz Cheney and economic opportunity zones.
Maybe a Democrat President who actually pitched UBI with the same gusto as the current president talked about "they're eating the cats and dogs" would do well. Polls are really useless when it comes to predictive power. If the last 10 years haven't taught you that I guess nothing ever well.
> it's why we are still here 250 years later
Like dude, 250 years is not exactly impressive amount of time.
Also AI side is not civil rights side. Nor new deal side. And it is dubious which side it would take in WWII. (We know grok side - nazi, but others)
On what scale? On the scale of a nation-state it certainly is. Most of ones you will likely name that have been around longer under the surface had far more discontinuities than it would appear. Take France, it's on its Fifth Republic I think, to say nothing of its medieval nature.
The United States is actually quite remarkable for 250 years of government under the same constitution. Please give some counter examples I'll wait.
> if there is UBI?
At least in the US, the public simply does not trust that the United States government will consider such a thing. They won't even consider universal healthcare. No-one is going to go "OK we trust you, you can build your data-centers now and we'll talk about UBI once you've 'disrupted' our jobs."
Yes, a bunch of CEOs are making the rounds talking about it, but talk is cheap. Even if that talk is directed at congress. Have any of them even cleared the flow bar of funding research into how it'd work and what the policy would look like?
> ... how it'd work ...
Step 1: tax the living bejeebers out of the companies, executives, and boards talking about replacing people with AI
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Utter utopia
> Why do people want to work if AI can do the job?
That's how they get paid.
> What's up with the data center hate?
Data centers are where AI comes from.
> Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI?
There is not.
> Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway?
Better working at a desk than sleeping under a bridge. A desk is probably one of the most comfortable working environments you can hope for.
> Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us?
Yes, there is not.
You're making a huge assumption there that UBI would be implemented successfully. On paper it sounds great to me, but if it's not done incredibly skillfully, UBI would just be a fast track to Zimbabwe-style economic ruin, except instead of just producing humorous-looking banknotes for the rest of the world, I'm pretty sure complete economic collapse of the US would have... a few pretty bad knock-on effects on most other countries, as in like, 2008 squared.
The biggest danger of UBI is that, since every seller knows now that every buyer has at minimum $XXXX/month to work with, anything that sounds like a great deal to someone at that income level will be repriced so that it's out of reach. e.g.
Your job income was $4000 a month, rent was $2000, childcare $1000, food, $500, car expenses $500. Now UBI comes around. All these things go up. Why do they go up? Some people say greed. This is wrong! There are still, say, 1000 2-bedroom apartments in your city, but now people have more money. Many people have been wanting to move up and now they can afford the $2000 rent. Maybe all the landlords are good Democrats and refuse to have would-be tenants bid, so they simply rent out all 1000 at the same $2000 rent (using a lottery to award them).
But now there are 200 more people who want apartments, and no apartments for them. Everyone knows there is this shortage. They're even willing to pay $2500 or $2700. New units are built that would not have been worth building at $2000 rent but which pencil out great at $2700 or $3000.
>Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us?
Prices are indeed just a label of whether we have a surplus, just right, or a shortage, but they're coded in psychology. We instinctively know what feels like an okay price for most things, and anything above that is a nearly 100% reliable indicator that we in fact have a shortage of that thing. And of course, the inverse too, which is why you see clearance racks with great deals on phone cases for 5-year-old cell phones.
You asked if we have more than enough excess. I'd say, no, we have for instance, way too few houses, and also not enough energy. Also not nearly enough semiconductors. Those are just a small sample, but those things are obviously pretty dang important. And we also of course have shortages of labor in actually useful fields like doctors, nurses, tax attorneys, auto mechanics, but way too much labor in other college-educated fields with less obvious applicability to life.
Which country do you live in that you have such a positive outlook about redistribution of wealth?
Most Europeans seem quite happy with their societes and the levels of redistribution of wealth. As do the citizens of most petro or other resource rich states. If compute is the new energy then many states with a similar advantage aggressively and successfully redistribute gains and have a higher quality of life for the median person than Americans enjoy.
Not everything is Venezuela or the Soviet Union.
How confident are you that the UBI hand out is going to be anywhere near what you made while working?
/me looks at the history of wealth distribution following new labor saving innovations
I would say the distributions from automated water heaters/boilers, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators replacing “ice boxes”, looms, assembly lines, farming combines, electric starter motors, and automated PCB assembly have been overwhelmingly good for people across a very broad spectrum of society.
Is that what you’re also looking at? Or objecting to the rewards rightly earned for bringing such advances to so many people’s lives?
We should be happy with a disproportionate amount of wealth going to rent seekers because they let us buy their goods and work in their companies making them even wealthier?
The wealthy always skew the rules to favor themselves, e.g. US capital gains being taxed at a lower rate than labor. The global standard of living has been going up but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.
People who create wealth for society by inventing and providing goods and services that others find valuable enough to buy are, by definition, not rent seeking when they do those things.
If you have complaints against rent seekers, that’s fine, but that’s not against “labor saving innovations” and it would probably serve you well to not confuse them, so you don’t inadvertently object to life-improving inventions.
> inventing and providing goods and services that others find valuable enough to buy
Are not getting rich. They get lower and middle class salaries.
Right, it's usually not the inventors, artists, etc. who reap the wealth generated by their creativity. The already-wealthy divert a disproportionate share of that productivity to themselves.
> but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.
Unfalsifiable claim since we can't predict what could have been if things had been done completely differently. But, Cuba distributes wealth more justly, so where are all the innovators coming out of Cuba? Where is the quality of life?
In fact, there are undoubtedly more Cubans building things, inventing things, and performing valuable services in the US than there are in Cuba, because in the US we allow you to be rewarded for providing something valuable to society.
If you turn the country into a wealth-redistribution paradise, the smartest people will all go somewhere else, because people don't want to work purely "For the Motherland." They want to help their country and provide for their own family's wellbeing too.
History has provided examples of this, but to top off their failure to deliver higher quality of life, most nations that established themselves explicitly to ensure fair distribution of wealth couldn't even restrain their elites from gorging at the "communal" trough to the point the commoners suffered great deprivation.
There are many alternative ways to distribute wealth, Cuban communism being only one of them. Capitalists would like us to believe in a false dichotomy between democratic capitalism and totalitarian communism.
Instead of Cuba, why not point to the sovereign wealth funds of Norway or Alaska? Or farmers' co-ops in the American midwest? Or just the generally successful democratic socialist countries in Europe where standard of living is better by many measures than in the US?
None of those are perfect, but they show that commerce and wealth distribution don't have to be purely "it takes money to make money".
0.
It doesn't have to be. Social cohesion and not having to work are already major benefits.
UBI is already premised on the fact that top earners will have to give something up if UBI is going to make sense. I've been relatively blessed, but I know no one's future is guaranteed. Thinking one has to only best accrue their own pile in a world of disruption doesn't make sense. Eventually the Bastille gets stormed. Why not get ahead of it and avoid the terror? Why burn the data center?
It's hard for people to see a socialist benefit when everything about the current version of AI seems like it's going to have an intensely focused capitalist outcome throwing us all simultaneously forwards and backwards into technofeudalism.
You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind of life. Which is not the elected representatives problem if it happens to happen more than 4 years into the future.
You kid, but Bezos said practically the same thing. That human need for water shouldn't hold AI back.
A satire site said Bezos said this.[1]
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bezos-water-consumption-ai...
Thank god. It's so hard to tell these days.
> people on UBI are also rather useless
UBI is going to get us a lot more artists of all kinds.
More of a lot of things. Universal healthcare (as opposed to employer-provided plans) encourages people to start their own businesses. UBI would be similar, but moreso.
We currently have a not-insignificant population living the UBI dream. No job, section 8 housing, food stamps, free healthcare via going to the emergency room for everything and not simply not paying, as well as other social programs.
What great art are these folks producing since they aren't burdened by having to work to survive? Mumble rap on Soundcloud? Shitty graffiti on every building?
> UBI is going to get us a lot more artists of all kinds.
I think the tech bros want to replace artists also
I agree with your point broadly, even the cynicism, but the following sticks in my craw:
> people on UBI are also rather useless
The point of life is not “that you be useful to the wealthy”.
It’s reaching the point of absurdity in my area. People are bringing “All data centers are flammable” signs to city meetings.
A plot of land that’s already zoned for the heaviest of industrial activities, is across the street from a dump, 3 miles from an airport, 16 miles from a nuclear generating station, and in a region with good climate, and no water crunch is a pretty good place for a data center.
Facts don’t matter, it’s a religious fight. Even if you provide numbers specific to the local area there’s no way to pierce the rhetoric.
Too much land? I added up lol the land used by the 10+ golf courses in the area. Dwarfs the proposal.
Too much water? I called the head of the parks department and asked them how much water the golf courses that they operate use each year. Massive.
Regional electricity costs going up? Our nuclear generating station already sells 80-85% of all power generated wholesale to other markets.
Data centers are loud? I measured the noise outside of my house. I live on a busy street. It was much louder than the viral videos going around Facebook with titles like “Data center noise from my porch SCARY MUST WATCH”.
I don’t know about all proposed data centers everywhere, but the one they’re eyeing to build in my backyard is fine by me.
I lived in Northern Virginia for years. Data centers are everywhere.
It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are actually far more efficient than the alternatives. Just don’t run them on coal, natural gas, or the souls of orphans. And don’t rely exclusively on evaporative cooling if it’s in the desert.
They’re having fun treating tech people like villains. It was the same or worse with bankers back in 2008-2010. Anything I have to say, any data provided, any comparisons made, are biassed because I “use data centers”. When I explain that they use data centers as well, I get the finger.
When I talked to an anti data center family member who runs a local Facebook news group (5,000+ subscribers) they just kept sending me Google AI summaries as counter points… My god. I don’t even use gen AI.
People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”. All of this on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. How many data centers are involved to get a post from poster to viewer? 2? 3? 8?
A bad data center project proposal somewhere should not mean opposition to data center projects everywhere.
> It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are actually far more efficient than the alternatives.
This isn't about efficiency, power, water, or fire. AT ALL.
Massive amounts of people have their jobs and livelihood threatened. The datacenters, which are enabling that, are being deployed in their neighborhoods while everyone in that neighborhood goes jobless. There is no plan of relief in the form of better economic policy, UBI, less taxation of actual humans, or anything else. That is the real crux of what is being fought.
I’ve noticed that people conflate being anti data center with being anti AI.
I don’t have any faith in the current crop of gen AI. I think it’s junk. I don’t think it’s replacing humans in drives. I can barely get it to refactor Sass code into a mixin.
Even if the AI bubble pops the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers.
If a speculator wants to create a bunch of construction jobs, build a site in a region with the power, water, climate to do so responsibly, and give us a bunch of money in property taxes. I’m for it.
I don’t care if his company folds and he loses his shirt. Someone will operate the data center.
They can’t get back the money they injected into the community during construction.
Eat while there’s food.
It's junk for mission-critical software. But stock photographers, tutors, therapists, writers, translators, designers, and others are being replaced in droves. The snowball is starting.
Even plumbers. AI told me what to buy from Home Depot and I diagnosed and fixed my last 2 plumbing problems myself.
And lawyers. I fought some minor issues on my own with AI guidance.
What a bad idea AI therapy is and I don’t know too many people who are using AI art commercially. Translators, sure. But we’ve been using Google Translate for almost two decades now.
You didn’t need AI for your plumbing. My dad had a whole set of books on household chores that we used to fix everything.
I do more of the work around my house than most. I won’t touch tall trees to fuck with my breaker box. I do most of my own plumbing.
But, plumbers are fine. Most people don’t want to handle their own shit.
> What a bad idea AI therapy is
People will use it, because they don't have money for real therapists, because they also lost their own job. Maybe you can give them free therapy if you think it's a bad idea?
> I don’t know too many people who are using AI art commercially
I see AI stock images absolutely everywhere in the news now, AI portraits all over the place, AI relit product images absolutely everywhere.
> You didn’t need AI for your plumbing. My dad had a whole set of books on household chores
I don't have time to read books when I have a plumbing issue and other shit to do. Normally I'd have paid $200 for a plumber. But with AI I didn't have to read the books, and I was able to solve it myself for $30.
I think current gen AI is junk. I don’t use it. I also don’t see mass job losses over it. Scapegoated? Yes. Actual mass unemployment? No.
Commercially, I typically see AI used in what amount to scams. And no, I don’t believe that anyone should be using it for therapy.
You don’t have time to glance at a diagram in a book but you have time to ask AI and go to Home Depot and do it yourself?
If you’re worried about job loss, pay the plumber. No one forced you to ask AI and do it yourself. You could argue that you still put money into the local economy by shopping locally. The money you saved can be spent on dinner and ice cream. Money is fungible.
It’s been a few hours. I’ve said all I have to say under this post. I’m going to stop replying now.
You're not wrong that the position of many anti-datacenter people isn't entirely rational (in the sense of "backed by solid numbers"), but you're entirely missing the point of why they are angry.
Consider this:
And now, they see a wave of building datacenters. Not only do these data centers have externalities for the climate, but their _purpose_ seems like a negative: putting their jobs at risk because AI, redirecting this wealth to the ultra-rich. There's nothing for them in this, it's lose-lose!And they see their own government encouraging and subsidising these projects, how could they not feel betrayed?
> People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”.
I don't think so. People would rather these benefits weren't there, but people exist in society and balance principle with practicality. You're allowed to criticise how AI is being brought into society while also using AI yourself, moral purity isn't a requirement to having opinions.
No, I know why they’re angry.
Hell, I don’t even use gen AI, I still think it’s unreliable junk.
However, most of the things that the people in my community are concerned about don’t apply to our region specifically. We’re actually in a position to benefit GREATLY. It’s useful to have that conversation.
What is the benefit? They provide no jobs and demand tax cuts.
Property taxes. Construction jobs. The land is unused and already had tax incentives. Remember, tax incentives don’t eliminate taxes, they just reduce them for a period of time to encourage development.
Surely you have some measure of empathy for their position? I’m sure you certainly did in 08, as people lost their homes.
I think it’s a topic that’s scary to many and this datacenter-to-be, or the local banker, just happens to be what they can easily protest.
2008 is apples vs oranges. The proposed data center site is across the street from the dump, just south of the airport. It’s zoned for heavy industrial use.
Literally anything that they could build there other than a data center would have a greater negative impact on the environment and a far less positive economic impact.
I could build a concrete crushing plant there.
Most other things they could build there could create a lot more local jobs.
And create a lot more pollution while generating much, much less in property tax revenue.
One refrigerator sized rack at a datacenter takes as much power as 150 homes, and they’re using it for technology that disempowers and annoys people. It’s pretty obviously offensive.
All for rezoning golf courses too
Nobody's shutting off those 150 homes to take their electricity, though. They have to buy it themselves. Lots of industrial things take tons of energy, from metal smelting to food production.
Oh, and datacenters alone shouldn't even make electricity more expensive, because rates are regulated. The state regulators have to approve rate raises. Now, are the regulators a bunch of stooges captured by the utilities who always do their bidding? Probably! But that's a good reason to throw your corrupt state politicians out of office and hopefully run them out of town on a rail -- not to protest datacenters.
Metal and food are useful, though.
the irony of making an implied point that data centers aren’t useful, by using data centers.
> One refrigerator sized rack at a datacenter takes as much power as 150 homes
Is this supposed to scare me or something? I can't even fathom the actual point you are trying to make if it doesn't involve me having an emotional response to this statement.
Seems pretty obvious- that datacenters very measurably contribute to rising costs of electricity and climate change , and unlike aluminum processing or farming which makes things people want, is used for AI which a lot of people resent. It’s a lose-lose
> datacenters very measurably contribute to rising costs of electricity and climate change
the people who make this true are the same people who oppose the data centers. if they just let people build solar and data centers neither of those things would be true.
Who’s saying not to build solar?
Currently, it's the US government, who is very opposed to renewable energy sources and very in favor of data centers/AI.
There's plenty of opposition to solar farms at the local level.
Wild to see people pretend like this isn't true while we're still in the middle of seeing how badly this shit has already fucked up hardware prices.
in b4 the 'apples and oranges' cope
You realize that "golfs are even worse so why people complain" is not a serious argument?
That’s not the core of the argument. You know that.
I’m putting things into perspective for people who are terrified that the last drops of their potable water and going to be used to generate a meme video.
But in PJM they are almost entirely being powered by natural gas and coal? Even if you contract out power from a nuclear plant some other plant on the grid is now enjoying a higher capacity factor, at the margin natural gas.
The data center in question in Utah was marketed as a 9GW full build out natural gas facility more than twice the electrical generation of the entire state. Coal electrical production in the US increased 13% last year.
I don’t defend every data center everywhere. I’m talking about the proposed data center about 11 miles from my door.
In my area we have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from that site. It sells 80-85% of all power generate wholesale to other markets. We have the power infrastructure here.
The amount of nuclear generation is roughly fixed (minus the refurbishment of three mile) in that region. If you add additional large load to the grid and outbid other demand for that power you are just shifting the load you replaced to other sources, which in PJM region would be mostly gas (new or existing) and delaying the decommissioning of existing base load coal plants. Renewables in that region are unfortunately a small percent of electrical generation.
I do agree that other demands like water consumption are overblown and could be largely regulated to enforce best practices. What infrastructure we are building as a society to meet this load demand is going to be the lasting impact of this generational infrastructure investment and it's looking like that will be mostly fossil fuel based in the near to mid term.
I’m only talking about my local area. I’m not defending the Colossus sites. I don’t live near them.
It is much more than the Colossus sites, I would look at the capacity additions in the regional grids you are apart of and what is being funded to meet these increases in demand from data centers. The majority of it is natural gas generation and a sizeable but minority amount of battery storage. Just outbidding people for a relatively fixed amount of clean nuclear ignores the second order effects of adding large loads like these. What happens in your area does have larger impacts.
Again, I’m talking about my region. We have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from the proposed site of the data center. That station sells 80-85% of the power generated wholesale to other parts of the state and grids regionally.
The nuclear generating station is part of a larger system. Say you build enough data centers in your local area to use up all the station power so that 80% is no longer exported, what is getting built somewhere else to make up for that missing generation the data centers now use? Its not new nuclear. When you add data center load to a grid how the additional generation is supplied is really what matters in terms of impacts.
We should have been building additional nuclear capacity for the past 50 years. The kinds of anti data center activism we’re seeing now was directed at nuclear back then.
It would take decades to build enough data centers to use 100% of the station’s capacity.
We can build capacity as we build consumers. It’s all about balance.
I also don’t believe that we’re going to be building all of the 1200 proposed data centers in the US.
Being next to a nuclear power plant but attached to a regional grid is irrelevant in terms of additive emissions from a data center build out. Companies are incentivized to care about disclosing a narrow boundary view of scope 2 emissions but we live in the real world not a spreadsheet.
Nothing this technology offers is, to me, worth the noise pollution or increase in water and electricity rates.
In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers. I'm sure there are market failures going on here in many places but it's not necessarily the case that you and the companies be on opposing sides. There are positive-sum solutions to a lot of these problems, if people are willing to consider them.
The problem is that we don’t correctly price pollution: it’d be one thing if this boom meant acres of solar panels and wind turbines getting greenlit but in practice it means keeping some dirty plants online and building out new pollution capacity, sometimes completely illegally like what happened in Memphis.
All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
Isn't most new capacity solar these days?
New is heavily solar, yes, but there’s still too much natural gas and the administration is deeply committed to returning the investment fossil fuel companies made in the president’s campaign so I wouldn’t bet on that continuing.
What’s more of a concern is coal being kept online just for data centers. Even if the national average drops, that’s a regional health risk where it happens.
https://www.powermag.com/power-demand-from-data-centers-keep...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
That we know of?
Do you trust these tech bros to be truthful?
> Just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line sits dozens of unpermitted gas turbines that power xAI’s Colossus 2 data center while releasing smog-forming pollution, soot, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde. The tech company set up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences.
https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
Sounds like a slam-dunk case for SELC?
“So glad we found a home for all of the Claudes!”
> in the long term
being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.
for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.
so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.
effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
It's quite amusing how easily people fall into the trap of Malthusianism when talking about water/electricity consumption of certain industries.
> In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers.
The same should apply to memory and GPU manufacturers and yet I have seen no commitments from them to increase supply, so the end result is that consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive compared to even just a year ago. That doesn't feel like a working economy to me.
This is an unusual comment to read because many manufacturers are public and therefore have released their expansion plans to shareholders (and therefore the public). Most recently, Micron is planning to build much more because their clients have made purchase agreements to 2030: https://www.aol.com/articles/micron-just-locked-100-billion-...
Don't all states have public utility commissions that regulate electricity provisioning? I don't know if the market has much to do with anything since it's all government regulation.
Data centers do more than AI. And you won’t defeat AI by killing data center proposals. The technology will succeed or fail on its own. We’ll find out in about 5 years.
Remember how “everyone” said all trucks will be self-driving in 10 years… 15 years ago?
There are something like 1200 data center proposals cross the US. How many of those will actually be built? How many are being proposed by speculators with no experience building or operating data centers? I have a feeling the number that will actually be built is significantly less that 1200.
I don’t think you’ve been near a data center if you think noise pollution is a problem.
Technology evolves and your opinion will evolve with it.
You're right, but that doesn't mean opinions will evolve towards viewing the technology more positively. With AI, it's increasingly the opposite.
It's already speeding up medical progress, so it'll probably take roughly however much time it takes for you to be personally affected by something that is currently incurable.
Source?
And I suppose that depends on whether I die first from not having access to healthcare after AI takes my job.
Mostly common sense and an understanding of how technology evolves but, but also:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.25329104v...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11326321/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
And more just a Google search away.
Thanks for the response, but unfortunately "common sense" is not a source.
And unfortunately, these aren't actual examples of medical progress being made. AI in some capacity is absolutely going to be helpful for medical research, but I'm still very skeptical LLMs are what is going to do it. I also do not think all the other BS coming with the current LLM wave outweighs the benefits. I think the reaction would be much different if these things weren't conflated, and if the focus of AI was towards things like medical research. As it stands, it comes off more as a coping mechanism / excuse that I do not think is convincing for most people when they see the majority of AI is used for garbage (to put it lightly).
They are literal proof of medical progress being made by LLMs. Luckily, your skepticism carries no weight. The applications of LLMs are incredibly wide because it is an incredibly important technology that has evolved its way to where it is from machine learning research that has been ongoing since the 1940's. That's why all of the robber barons are doing all of the typical robber baron things that they always do when a world-changing technology that everybody is going to be using comes along.
The thing is that YOU can actually choose what to focus on at any time. You have clearly chosen to not focus on the STEM work being bolstered by LLMs that will accelerate as the technology does, to a degree in which I literally linked you research papers that support my claim and you hand-waved them away because they are in direct conflict with your preconceived notions.
If it is your belief that AI isn't useful, then as an engineer using LLMs daily, your opinion is laughably uninformed or you perhaps haven't used LLMs since forming it. I also don't understand how anyone can use LLMs extensively and believe that their job is in jeopardy. They cannot reason like a human and they absolutely require a human to pilot them. If people are losing their jobs to LLMs, then blame the follow-the-leader CSuite morons who don't understand the technology as much as you don't, and not the technology.
It's like being mad at trains in the 1830's.
Tech bros whether they realize it or not are living a philosophy of fear. They say: in order for YOU to be healthy and safe, we should be allowed to trample THEM (the undesirables), because trust us, the end result will be worth it.
Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?
They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.
And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.
"The beatings will continue until opinions evolve."
Datacenters are needed regardless of whether or not AI -- "this technology" -- is what will be deployed there.
Not to mention the tax breaks they're given for no material benefit to the community.
Future Illinois data center tax breaks on hold - https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-br... - June 25th, 2026
State Data Center Policy Shifts as Governors Impose New Restrictions - https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-cente... - June 22nd, 2026
Gov. JB Pritzker suspends tax breaks for data centers, urges more discussion - https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-susp... - June 5th, 2026
Which States Are Banning Data Centers? - https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-ce... - June 2nd, 2026
US tax incentives for data centers by state - https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04c...
Tax Incentives for Data Centers 50 State Survey - https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentives... [pdf]
Good thing the market is bigger than just you.
I've been an indie filmmaker since I was a teenager. Seedance 2.0 and all of the image and video models are such an amazing gift to use. The things you can push these models to do are incredible. I have a full VFX workbench. I can rotoscope, I can pull off effects shots. I can even use these things to articulate non-shotlist things for meetings. It's incredible. The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
I've professionally been a systems engineer. Five/six nines reliable services that move billions of dollars, etc. I have fallen in love with coding models. I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling. The job we're all in is to provide value - these models are the next generation of compilers. We're working at higher and higher levels of abstraction, and it's brilliant. For those of us who can operate at all of the levels, it's a super power.
I will not go back to pre-AI times. I want to see what things are like in 10, 20 years. When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs, where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast, where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
This is the most excited about tech I've ever been. This is so much better than smartphone incrementalism and stupid web platforms.
Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds. This is literally the jetpack future we were promised growing up. It's the coolest thing since the internet.
Can you share something you’ve made with AI?
I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.
I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.
> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
> Hopefully you can find parking.
One of the supposed benefits of true self driving cars is that you never have to find parking near where you're going ever again. Get out, send your car off to park somewhere 5 miles away.
discovery has always been the problem with art. many people are instrinsically motivated to create, that's why we have so much art
AI is orthogonal to human connection. people like people
> AI is orthogonal to human connection.
No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.
And now discovery is becoming exponentially harder, because every niche can get flooded with AI slop by companies trying to extract profits from real people's creativity.
Even if you use these tools to create something amazing, what keeps hundreds of variations "inspired by, but totally not copied" of your creative work from popping up? As these models get cheaper and more powerful, this issue will only get worse and worse.
this is the same argument against the printing press, photography, home printers, youtube, etc
it is a bad argument. more accessible tools consistently lead to more creation in a positive way
There is a fundamental difference between those technologies and generative AI. I ask again: what stops companies from creating literally dozens, hundreds or thousands of copies of any creative work you publish? Why shouldn't they create AI artists that copy small artists in a "legally distinct" manner, and at a volume that drowns them out?
As these models get better and better, the only limiting factor is the available compute. Meanwhile data centers are being built like there's no tomorrow.
Okay, now produce something meaningfully more appealing than everyone else with the same tools - when you do that, then you have the start of a leg to stand on to claim that it’s worth the cost to everyone.
Enjoy it until the subsidies end and the economics catch up. You can afford it now with broad subsidies, but likely not the true cost.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...
https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover
https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY
The cost argument is wrong. Compare Gemini 2.5 Pro to Gemma 4 31B.
Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.
Except no one will be able to afford those laptops. The hyperscalers will buy up literally all the RAM and high power GPUs. So you'll be stuck with 8GB of unified memory on anything affordable. A laptop of better capability will cost 50% more than today (at least). That won't be your biggest problem because some C-suite goon with stars in their eyes laid you off because of AI.
If you only ever want frontier model performance then sure, you have to pay to play. But as it is now with open models, some of which I can even run from my gaming PC at home, we're only about 6 months behind frontier performance. Even when the money starts drying up for those at the forefront, the genie is out of the bottle.
And yet, the productivity increases with existing models are meh (ie not 0 but certainly not worth what is being spent) based on the data. Enjoy the tulips while they bloom.
https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=1009840...
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703 - February 2026 (306 comments)
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 - February 2026 (172 comments)
AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253 - September 2025 (171 comments)
Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says - https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")
The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 - https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa... - July 2025
("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence")
Productivity is typically a broader scale measure against the economy. I 100% agree that the shoehorned adoption of AI into general company processes is more of a negative than a positive. Most people here would agree that AI has only really affected productivity positively in the past 6 months-1 year. So obviously there wont be much general uplift across all industries yet, and obviously that would mean there's not really enough data to go off of empirically yet.
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
With the most politeness I can muster, show me the data. “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” If the data doesn't exist supporting the productivity improvement assertion, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And that's why I pivoted at the beginning of this year to LocalLLMs.
I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.
When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.
>Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds.
God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.
China is going to mow us over because we're shooting ourselves in the face.
We frankly deserve it.
You won't have any jobs in that scenario either.
>China is going to mow us over because we're shooting ourselves in the face.
The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.
> The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.
I wouldn't. They'll just handle it differently than we would in the US.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/unemployment-rate - It's around 5% per this (and some other sources I found, just linking the one). The population being around 1.4 billion people, that means around 70 million unemployed. That is already mass unemployment despite having a low rate of unemployment across their national population. And that's before getting to their youth unemployment rate which is around 15%, which sets them up poorly for the future.
"Mass unemployment" can't be based on raw numbers instead of rate, as otherwise no small country could have it.
Alright, what's the threshold? Is the 15% youth unemployment enough to indicate mass unemployment within that demographic at least?
Think of the corporate profit gains which won't benefit you at all bro. It's all about the value proposition.
> In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
What the comments fail to point out (and I haven't read the article to find out if they address it): the number of data centers being built is based on speculation of need and is a dramatic over-estimate. It has to be. What, other than AI has happened in the last few years that would warrant that many new data centers? How do they know there will be customers for that capacity? There will not be advances in algorithms, etc that do AI much more efficiently? (We know China is making strides in that!)
It's complete speculation! It's the new gold rush and everyone wants a data center. Most of these data centers might not even be built! And the ones that are, might never make any profit.
The rhetoric around AI has been insane for years now. AI will kill us all. AI will take all our jobs. SaaS is dead. AI is too dangerous to even release.
It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.
But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.
Ah the power of Social Media manipulation. https://www.axios.com/2026/06/05/china-fueling-us-data-cente...
Allegedly.
Another groups claims false flag operation. Ain't it great?
Ah, Axios. The same great outlet that has gotten the scoop on the Iran war ending numerous times.
you believe this?
I'm pointing out there are two groups blaming each other. I don't know which is right.
But I absolutely believe that social media's agenda is a directed agenda.
Even OpenAI believes it, and found concrete evidence: https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...
wow, that’s crazy that OpenAI is saying that negative opinion against them is actually a nefarious foreign conspiracy, and does not actually indicate people hate them
If data centres use gas turbine engines they would be far better off to not affect power in those areas of communities
Honestly, voter backlash occurs for every reason. Build more homes? Backlash. Build more wind? Backlash. Build more solar? Backlash. Build more geothermal? Backlash. Build more urban subway? Backlash. Build high-speed rail? Backlash. What I can conclude from this is that what is right to do and what voter backlash occurs in is orthogonal. I think it is right that we build all these things and more nuclear power, and more residential super towers, and more datacenters, and the other things for the same reason we climb the mountains, fly the Atlantic, and Rice plays Texas.
Agreed. Change makes people uncomfortable. The nature of the change doesn't matter; the transition itself is the root of the discomfort.
When things are stagnant, we gradually optimize our lives towards a low energy state and overfit to our exact circumstances. When a change in circumstances reveals past optimizations to be wasted work, it kick-starts the four stages of grief over the loss of that low energy state.
How does a new datacenter help the voters? All they see is that their electricity prices are going to go up.
why do we give a shit what voters think should happen on someone else's property again?
Because "we" want to get elected?
It’s so strange, we’ve been building data centers for ages without being a jerk about it…
It's not really about AI, data centers, water consumption, or energy. Those are real issues. But I don't think that's what gets people so riled up.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
> The rage that Luigi Mangione felt
Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.
I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
> AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately.
Source?
Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
The average American is absolutely an elite. Globally and historically, we are both in the 1%.
> Source?
All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
> Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not
I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
> All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
Then you should have no problem pointing to concrete examples of how it's actually improved life for the average person.
> I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
If you want to describe anyone with any education as an "elite", go ahead, but it's not convincing and is pretty anti-intellectual.
I sure am glad I'm apparently an elite and didn't know it, though! Who knew being an elite means you're barely able to make rent, will never be able to afford having children, have to forgo medical care due to the costs involved, and would be homeless within a few months if you got laid off?
This is a pretty predictable reaction to the underhanded tactics being used to try to force these projects through either before citizens know they're happening and often, when citizens are aware, against their will.
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
You get the same vigor against all of those project all the time. Windmills, solar, nuclear, rail, etc. There's a stronger will to oppose than to build.
We do muster this kind of vigor. The problem is that coverage decisions shaped by negativity bias ensure you're much more likely to hear about the projects people don't like. Did you hear about the huge New Mexico wind farm, largest in the US to date, that came online two weeks ago?
That's true, but I also see a lot of infrastructure projects that get gummed up or even canceled by NIMBYs, industry incumbents, and general obstructionism that would've happened had they been undertaken with the same bull-in-china-shop approach these datacenter projects tend to take.
This goes to every LinkedIn brain idiot spouting recycled nonsense about the new Industrial Revolution and that white collar jobs are going away. These blabbering idiots never read a story book to understand the time period, that people displaced by industrialization were uneducated illiterate farm workers in a period in time before democracy.
Jump today most countries stable enough to build infrastructure are democracies and the white collar people you are demonizing do vote and that immense investment in infrastructure is not really easy to relocate.
even if datacenters aren't good for the communities there are in, it would be much worse if China advances in AI faster.
this is one of the core flaws in democracy, while the popularity contest generally curbs blatant abuse (also note how even that fails miserably when the electorate groups start to hate each other), the vast majority of people have no real way to judge the impacts of non-trivial decisions and judgement doesn't even need to come with certainty, just knowing which risks are worth it. voters will never get it right.
and in the information age, democratic sabotage is many times easier than informing a public that in most cases has no interest in being informed when the group think/herd instincts are triggered.
i suspect democracy only worked well thus far because it was never truly real. media was always concentrated and there were no non-democratic peers. this is no longer the case. when the media was concentrated democracy was just an emergent properly of media dynamics. now it's chaotic and subject to external targeted perturbation.
I think China "advancing" faster is better. Hoarding some magic numbers on a hard drive isn't a sound business plan, and shouldn't be what we're betting the farm (literally) on.
they are only releasing open weight models to damage the closed off US AI corpos.
while the next GLM model may get a similar open release, I doubt the one after that will.
Or maybe they have different incentives and don't see providing an inference as a service for the entire world as a viable business model.
Open source isn't a zero-sum game.
Look at which models are getting open-weights vs. which ones aren't.
That tap can be shut off at any time and it's already being shut off for their biggest models.
AI is hated far more than crypto.
No other technology gets as much hatred as AI is getting as the public see that as a threat to their own jobs.
Of course techies here are having trouble understanding this backlash. Maybe they should read up a bit on the Unabomber Manifesto to draw parallels on the motivations of the awful attacks against CEOs recently.
Just like crypto, you cannot use it to solve social problems with technical solutions. The same goes for AI as it still requires humans and trust to use it effectively.
The more AI data centers get built, the more it is hated and the worse society gets with this loss of trust as more people read about more mass layoffs.
The US needs to build out energy infra like China, already >2x more total generation capacity (~1/3 of world total). Putting data centers aside, if America wants to bring manufacturing back, it will need energy to build things. RE: data centers, we do need to be more mindful of where they go and the resources they consume. We should force them to use water efficient cooling (more expensive for them) and support the buildout of the required energy gen. Utah does not seem an appropriate place for such a large data center.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB (Adam Tooze prezi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
Most US citizens want to be an electrostate. This current administration wants to go back in time and try to be a petrostate....
That may not be true for much longer given the (disappointing) trend
2020 - 79 : 20 (renewables : fossil fuel)
2026 - 57 : 42
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/04/03/americans-shi...
Which is why it was a mistake to let Republicans vote
All people (should) have the right to vote. If you don't like they way they vote, persuade them. This culture of political domination is at the core of our issues.
I know I’ll get downvoted into oblivion but I can’t help but think data center and ai backlash manufactured or is a psi-ops campaign by Russia or China
It doesn’t make any sense to me as the externalities are future not current and at no other point in time has the public cared about the future without first seeing concrete examples of harm. That hasn’t happened yet for data centers nor AI. It’s all “if, maybe, sometime in the future”
People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. So it feels like people are stirring the pot. like if not Russia or China then just influencers doing it for rage bait for likes and subscribes
I’m not saying they are wrong, I can’t predict the future, I’m only saying it feels unusual for the reasons mentioned above
Almost every major issue has bot networks from hostile countries playing both sides of any issue to intentionally cause chaos. I completely agree that russia, china, or some other country is fomenting anger here.
That and the other issues aside, I think AI companies have done this to themselves. They've gone around talking about replacing all human labor and becoming the companies that control robot god's that swallow the entire economy and put everyone out of work and might destroy man kind. Well saying that is gonna make people hate them and that will find an outlet somewhere
so what makes you think that you aren't responding to a bot intending to sway your opinion by giving a shape to your preconceived notions so that your position crystallizes further, right now?
From folks I've talked to in real life, it really does seem that way. They're getting their information from Facebook but it's mixed in with the "5G towers are killing all the bees" and the usual anti-vaccine rhetoric. Seeing that erin brockovich has jumped on the anti-data center bandwagon makes it even more suspicious to me.
OpenAI literally found Chinese accounts trying to use ChatGPT to generate anti-datacenter propaganda: https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...
What is so objectionable about data centers anyway? That they consume utilities without employing a substantial amount of people? Compared to actual manufacturing like fabs the pollution concerns are laughable. The water use issue seems to be a wedge.
I live in an area built on paper mills. Our rivers are trashed from the paper mills. It smells bad in areas because of paper mills. Paper mills use a lot of electricity. But people are absolutely losing their minds over the pollution from proposed data centers. I'm not sure there's a cleaner industry in existence.
Data centers are where AI comes from.
"Voted backlash", nothing will change.
I've never seen the level of anti-scientific, straight misinformation as I have with data centers. I genuinely think it's to the point where the antivaxxers have a stronger scientific backing for their stance.
It did not feel organic at all. It's to the point now where that initial seeding of ideas has gained legitimate traction, but the initial burst of anti-datacenter content was wild to see in real time.
It's absolutely not organic: https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...
Generally, I'm glad that "the people" appear to be pointed in the IMHO correct direction, even if for imprecise, or maybe even wrong, reasons.
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
I'm happy to endure HN if it means I get to see hopeful, reasonable observations like yours.
This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists. It cross-cuts against the old and outdated political compass.
Neo-luddites are usually the educated elite and genealogy is from old green or left politics but includes nationalists and social conservatives.
I think media is broadly failing to recognise this new clan.
The current far right government/movement (aka conservatives) is far more in favor of AI than people opposed to them. You seem to be labeling just about everything as the opposite of what it actually is. Are you invested in or working at an AI company?
I think your view is too simplistic and falls easily into the populist narrative so you end up mislabelling me as being invested.
You are again doing the thing I flagged in my original comment - the left right or progressive/conservative axis is not useful anymore. As an example: a lot of tech CEO's were originally against Trump but ended up caving precisely because the left became anti-technology broadly.
From experience and anecdotes, tech and AI optimism cross cuts into the old axis. Examples
1. third world countries are way more optimistic about AI than first world
2. many celebs (for the lack of better word) are pro AI - look at Redis, Django, NodeJS, Github
3. the existence of Effective Altruism itself should prove that this axis is useless - EA was largely leftist and support democrats while also being "pro" AI like Anthropic is mostly made from the EA cult
The nomenclature also doesn't make sense to me. Why would conservatives not conserve but rather push for progress? What are conservatives conserving instead? The academic consensus is that technology determines the societal culture and if conservatives wanted to conserve anything, they would conserve technology first wouldn't they?
None of this changes the fact that average people aren't elites, no matter how much you may try to spin it that way.
And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
You think there's a binary of elites vs non elites which is using a Marxist framework that I (and almost mainstream academic) would reject.
> And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
Thanks for proving my point, you are emphasising the exact divide I was trying to show originally. You may try to twist the rhetoric to show that you are for slow and cautionary progress of tech. That's sensible and I don't mean to claim neo-luddites would outright deny progress itself.
> This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists.
You have multiple comments calling anyone opposed to AI in any way an "educated elite". If you don't accept that framework, stop using it.
When I look at the total number of acres in a state and the number that may get taken up by a data center… not that we should even have to look at this spec but still not sure why people are so focused on data center construction as an issue unless it’s literally going to be next to your house, is there anything more than FUD going on here? And perhaps people taking advantage of it specifically as a talking point given election season.
You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
I think part of it is the perception that real environmental and public health damage is being done for totally trivial and indefensible causes. A data center is not like an airplane parts manufacturer, which has lots of ugly pollution but provides a necessary national service. Most people use generative AI recreationally, and the productivity gains among white-collar workers are awfully ephemeral. And if you're less pessimistic about the economics of generative AI... that makes it worse!
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
Misdirected outrage. DCs are an easy outlet for people's AI frustration.
Water usage concerns in a desert, perhaps?
When people hear datacenter they think ai-almost universally subsidies by the many for the few. They drive up electrical costs, increase carbon emissions, and are designed to make money by stealing and repackaging the fruit of human labor and thought, with the goal of ultimately replacing it not for the benefit of all, but for the benefit of the owners of that datacenter.
What's not to like?
> the Stratos development would have spanned tens of thousands of acres in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley. The project would ultimately require up to 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
"Privatize gains, socialize losses"
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters. I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
The problem is not the center per se. The problem is the power. And, all too often they make up for the lack of utility capacity by putting in their own noisy generators.
Datacenters are a hedge the investor class is pushing and it's not really needed.
Once you realize:
1) LLM = CPU 2) Session Context = L1, L2, L3, CPU Cache
the entire AI industry is operating within the CPU cache of the LLM provider this is why cost moves quadratically, increases noise - signal ration, regenerative feedback loop, it dilutes the user narration, and it actually creates an architectural induce hallucination.
We've literally solved this problem in the 1960's with a memory architecture:
the OS has a memory controller, tasked with taking data from persistant structure storage (HD) loading into CPU Cache and the CPU computers, the output is stored in RAM and then moved into HD.
this is required on all AI applications, what the industry has done, is supplement a RAG which is summarizing context, however the entire context summarized chain is still being processed by the LLM.
if you employ a well sustain memory architecture you can retrieve the context you only need to feed to the llm. reduce token cost and then reduce energy therefore less demand of datacenters.
checkout my article and what i built metaop.ai it's a humble promotion but no one cares about ai memory. https://x.com/metaopai/status/2070187664192524528