I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.
The newer ones are using on-site generators that are insanely loud and require multiples more power than datacenters have historically needed. For a rack with traditional servers with just RAM/CPU/Drives, 5kW is sufficient in most cases.
When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.
I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.
I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.
Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.
> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries. They're starting to learn about the effect consistent noise at that level has on their mental & physical well-being as well.
I believe there’s been a number of investigative journalists/ YouTubers that have looked into this and it can be quite staggering. Not just human audible noise but infrasound and ultrasound as well. IIRC Ben Jordan’s video “ Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons” would probably be a good place to start.
They could build these data centers to eliminate the noise but it’s cheaper to ruin the livability of surrounding areas.
Town by me had a huge outcry about a proposed data center and how it would ruin the area. Funnily enough there's already data centers on the same street!
I think there's truth to what you're saying but I also think there's truth to what people are experiencing and perceiving.
A highly power and/or water consumptive data center being installed in a town or city is pretty much a perfect embodiment of people's frustrations. It consumes tons of power and/or water and therefore drives up utility costs for the locals or pollutes the air with diesel exhaust. And it doesn't create jobs so it's just frankly some rich cabal of capitalists getting richer while people's lives continue to feel materially worse. I can't think of a better embodiment of the sort of confluence of crumminess that seems to be underway.
I've heard talk from some folks telling these people that their concerns about data center water use, power, noise etc. are overblown. Water companies disagree, saying data center water usage in fact is quite significant. Oops. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/21/not-enou...
Amazingly, they managed to _undersell_ the ill effects that the oil industry would have on even just the US, such as the oil-driven military actions we've taken over the years.
> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
A new class of oligarchs are trying to obsolete every profession and human endeavor for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. You don't need a PhD in environmental policy or domain expertise in construction to listen to what AI advocates are saying and realize their success comes at the expense of society, and say "no thank you."
Data center construction is not a proxy for powerlessness, but the vanguard of the powerful.
In Nashville they messed up by trying to build one next to the zoo, a beloved and popular attraction (higher attendance than our NFL franchise). The public outcry was swift and effective, new zoning rules were passed last night. https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/07/21/nashville-data-center...
From reading the article, it sounds like one of the three items passed was an extension of a moratorium on data center building specifically for the area around the zoo. Another item involves eminent domain for the city to buy the land next to the zoo for use as city office space instead. So it pretty directly impacts the zoo's situation.
It's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs.
I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.
> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.
This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.
Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.
Site selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.
I don’t understand why they’re doing this? Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive they’d rather build on top or right next to housing? Is it the water supply ? I don’t understand why someone would do something so clearly self defeating
Anytime you see someone repeatedly doing a bad thing the reason they're doing it is because they want to do it and there are isn't sufficient push-back or consequences for doing it.
Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening.
Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.
The whole thing is a motte and bailey game. The largest of cloud companies might build a data center which is 1GW. There won't be 4000 of those and it won't be next to your house. A huge number of commercial office buildings already have a 100kW data center in them, and have for decades, without anyone having any reason to know or care. For those 4000 is certainly an underestimate.
If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.
Speculation isn't a dirty word and both can be true.
Demand is very high today and exceeds capacity. Builders think demand will continue to grow. This seems plainly correct. Firms may differ in how high demand will go, but it is still more than today.
You are trying to pick a fight with a post that isn't making the point you assume it is. All that guy is saying is that there is a rush to build them, which is objectively true.
Whether or not the datacenters return on the investment is a different question.
There's a demand for data centers, but maybe not a demand for actual usages of the data centers. That's the distinction I think they were trying to make by pointing to existing data centers not even being used to full capacity in-house (and being rented out instead).
They could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.
That's what they should do. Datacenters don't need to be in anyone's backyard. The US has vast amounts of unused land as well as urban brownfields that are sitting empty. Put them there.
You're not getting it into an urban brownfield unless it comes with price controls on energy.
I live amongst the urban brownfields of Baltimore and our politicians are under tons of pressure to stop data center projects (and to tar and feather utility executives).
Has anyone thought about perhaps tar and feathering the politicans and bureaucrats that wrote all the rules that make greenfield development with a transmission line tap a non-starter?
The developers would looooove to not deal with brownfields, not have pissed off neighbors, not deal in complex urban sites, etc, but greenfield above a tiny size is effectively outlawed piecemeal in many states.
Yes, the AI Datacenters are much worse for the environment. xAI is using methane-turbines to power theirs, and they are allowed to pollute your communities because they bribed the Trump admin.
I have some degree of sympathy for data centers, and anyone else that needs power, only because of how broken our regulatory state is on approving new transmission.
To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear.
If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.
The country first and foremost should serve all its citizens. Not just wealthy people and not just people of the dominant ethnic background. The xAI data centers sits right next to a poor african american community and Musk used emergency turbines that were not designed for continuous daily use. He utilized a loophole to get past those restrictions. Those turbines are burning gasses inefficiently and producing a lot of pollution that is directly harming those residents who likely don't even materially benefit from all this effort.
These people likely had nothing to do with the delay in solar installs, or decades of nuclear NIMBYism yet now because Musk cannot fall behind, they now have to suffer with no one in government caring about them.
Its a real life hell, they cannot physically resist or cause any trouble or else the government will come and kill them where they stand, they cannot afford to move away because who would buy their houses (and why should they abandon their life's community for something they had no part in?) so they sit and suffer day after day with declining health for their family. Framed like this, Musk is like a locust who has come to devour whatever good there was and then move onto the next prey.
Lol. A data center is no more than a industrial bread bakery (oddly specific i know). The entire anti-data US center is ran by China. EG. You can run a rack of servers in your closet. China is doing a great job.
I can attest for the smells better. Now, I'm left wondering which smells worse, an AI datacenter or a large beer brewery. As a kid, we had a Mrs. Baird's bread bakery which was in the heart of town that students would take field trips to see (which is no longer there and is now apartments). On the other side of town is a Budweiser plant, and it's infamous for being so odorific but it is located way the hell out there.
What bakery are you thinking of that pulls the equivalent of a mid sized nuclear power plant? Because you’re off by an order of magnitude I think. (2.2MW maybe)
You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.
You need cooling, power, and at the data center I used to work at they literally ran out of power and couldn't get any more from the city. They actually built a new building in the parking lot so they had cause to request more power
Adversaries are happy to rule up democracies in any way possible, and it is foolish to think that there are zero concerns about placement of AI datacenters.
Lol the entire pro-data US center is ran by elon musk and the other cronies that bribed the Trump admin to let them violate the clean air act. They use gullible losers that will swallow their propaganda whole and promise them "AGI."
I agree that I don’t want a data center in my backyard either.
What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
I tried to look for one in my state and a few surrounding areas and couldn’t find any. There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
There was another story about a small town without any major electricity or communication infrastructure coming together to impose a moratorium on data center construction. There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all, but they felt so threatened that they needed to convene and put on a big show about banning it.
The social phenomenon of the data center construction protest movement is really fascinating. My assumption is that it will run its course and then be mostly dropped when the next current thing comes along.
There are some actual concerns about using natural gas instead of trying to utilize the optimal power sources or locations, but they’re mostly overshadowed by bogeyman complaints like thinking that a data center is going to end up in your backyard or water consumption that is negligible compared to golf courses and swimming pools.
> There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all
You have to be fair on this though. The time to ban something is before they start talking about doing it, not after. Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.
I'd like to add some extra strong emphasis/support to your post:
>Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.
It's not merely "never a bad thing", for certain tools like zoning it is, at least in the jurisdictions I know of, required to be well ahead and consistently enforced. It's not something towns are allowed to do retroactively, if you have no proper legal town plan/zoning setup in place as well as various ordinances like noise then by default the only controls are the relatively weak state ones. There are many things a government is allowed to do if it's part of an overall plan that applies to all equally, but not if it's "we just don't like those guys specifically", and the best way to demonstrate that is to be making no special moves around a given arrival at all but rather to have it all setup.
Of course, there are as you suggest lots of other good reasons to be ahead too. It's a lot easier to consider things thoroughly and get community agreement when there isn't massive time pressure or lobbying going on and emotions aren't running high. It's easier to get some expert consultation at reasonable prices (in some cases there may even be community members with the skills and willingness to volunteer if it's not a time crush), to enact longer term infrastructure plans, to get any state approval if needed, etc etc. But there are legally serious hard lines as well and if towns are caught napping they may just not be able to use them at all.
The interesting thing about the anecdote wasn't the timing. It was that there was no reason to build a data center there but they felt compelled to make it their top priority.
> especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure.
Small, remote towns without electricity or data connections are not easily exploited for data centers.
Are we really expecting small town residents to have sophisticated enough prediction powers to know if a bigco company might target their town for a data center build? What's the cost of a false negative vs. a false positive for them? Better safe than sorry applies in spades here.
I don't think anyone's talking about towns where electricity is absent or expensive.
Instead it's locations that begin with cheap electricity (attracting the datacenter) but the residents fear a significant increase in electricity costs with no local economic benefits to offset it.
I might believe that if the protests weren't being organized on Facebook and then posted to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
It's more like garbage dumps. People don't want to moderate their production of garbage, they just don't want any consequences of it to be too close to their house.
"I see you're complaining about society and yet you participate in society! Very interesting! I am very smart."
This is not a good or reasoned take. People organize where the other people are because that's how you get the most people. It is nor hypocrisy to use Facebook as a platform to organize protests against other tech companies. Just as it is not hypocrisy to criticize the society you live within.
This is a very stupid observation made by people who can't be bothered to consider the realities of life away from their keyboard.
It is a good or reasoned take (but perhaps not both!). There is some sliver of hypocrisy in condemning tech companies wholesale while enjoying their products. But just because something is hypocritical, it doesn't invalidate all related criticisms. If you don't like the negative byproducts of a good or service, that's a perfectly valid gripe. But those byproducts are a necessary consequence of the status quo. In order to eliminate or mitigate the undesired consequences, some change would need to occur in the real world that would require a hitherto unforeseen innovation or it would otherwise increase the cost of providing the good or service, potentially so much so that prices would increase to undesirable levels, or it would become economically unviable to produce the good or service entirely. So without more specific criticism, and combined with polemic rhetoric, it's reasonable to assume that some are arguing that the world would be better off without AI datacenters and the models they support entirely. And if those same persons enjoy those same services, it's reasonable to sense some tension there. Maybe they haven't thought the whole thing through. I don't think it's a stupid observation.
Yea, there's probably not one single issue that people are fed up with, but datacenters have become lightning rods that represent big tech's disproportionate power over us, job-displacing AI, and are a visible example of how municipalities that we elect--serve and prioritize companies from out of town over their voters.
> What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.
Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?
It's easy for politicians to support a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody will really oppose it, and it's a safe way to appear to be "fighting for the community."
And on the flip side, I live in Fairfax County, VA and there are data centers EVERYWHERE. Especially if I cross into Ashburn (home of AOL and stuff) - literally mixed in with large townhome developments.
And the current plan - building a data center in Canaan Valley - is a whopper... 785 MW natural gas power plant on site with diesel generator backups (solely for the data center, not sold back to grid), 500+ acres of land, 2 million sqft initial building space, air quality impact assessment by the state is heavily redacted, $4 billion price tag.
All right next to one of DC's most popular outdoor/skiing recreation areas. The DC would loom over the two towns that support the entire region.
They'd probably love to sell spare capacity back to the grid but the way interconnection is handled they'd likely be on the hook for a bunch of other upgrades to facilitate that hence why they're not.
This is such an obvious concern that it's hard to understand how the GP didn't think of it as well. Clearly, people don't always consider all the things and get focused in so they can't see the forest for the trees.
>It also doesn't necessarily matter if the data centers actually raise electricity rates.
>Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.
So in other words burn the credibility and reputation of whatever you're using for that purpose so you can pull a quick "fuck you got mine" to the tune of several cents per kwh off your bill.
That sort of policy making is not sustainable and is exactly the sort of selfish shortsighted thinking that birthed the current political climate.
Edit: At leas you're honest about it. The usual peddlers of such stuff are in denial about what they're doing so they can't be made to understand the tradeoffs.
As I see it, the AI companies are the ones that started the "fuck you got mine" defense. Look at how they obtained their data to train their models. Look at how they've gone about building their data centers. It's yet another example of how tech companies hurry up to get established with no regards for anything other than getting to a point of being too big to stop.
Data centers are conflated with rising energy costs.
It's partly about people's nominal objections, but mostly an attempt to hold them hostage to extract some energy bill subsidies (and general cost of living relief).
If you look at Elk Grove Village, Illinois as their budget there after declaring they would become the AI Datacenter Capital of the World -- there is an obvious answer:
Suburbs cannot continue to pay for their infrastructure without drastically increasing taxes or finding new sources of income.
> There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
No one ever cared about DCs before now. I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
Ironically, There’s enough issues with the DC buildout going on that even with 100% public opinion support it would still be significantly delayed. The behind the meter power generation isn’t going well. There’s only so many gas fired turbines on the market. And connecting a DC to an established grid isn’t like clicking a button in AWS no matter how much money you have.
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement, as someone who lives in Northern Virginia and is effectively watching the Datacenter battle unfold from the front lines, and dealing with the local politics and electricity costs rising at a precipitous rate.
Our electricity bill has doubled. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors want to erect “Statue of Liberty” sized power transmission lines, and those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.
Part of the reason people care about Datacenters now is that they’re starting to litter the landscape, take resources from local municipalities, and raise costs for everyone involved, whereas previously there were not enough of them to really move the needle as being a problem.
Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”.
They're building a mass of DC's near me as well in northern IL (not quite as many as by you). I see a lot of weird stuff on social media - people inactive for years all of a sudden becoming super-activists and posting non-stop anti-DC content. Nearly identical content to what's being pushed by a bunch of faceless accounts named like "Water4All","Nature Reign" - something vaguely environmental sounding.
Talking points like:
"We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030"
It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system".
There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
That's not incorrect though; you're still needing to shed the heat energy SOMEWHERE. Thermodynamics alone dictates that basic fact. You may not waste the cooling solution but all that excessive GPU heat is going to need to go somewhere - and the only place it ultimately goes is right into the environment.
Ever stand a bit away from a campfire because you got too warm, only to have the wind hit it and blow hot air over you? Same thought exercise applies here.
Yeah, but the thing is - those guys aren't using the majority of data center capacity out there.
The Anti-DC crowd doesn't appreciate that the surveillance state is coming with our without all these DC's being built. That is going to get hosted some where, some way. The fix is regulatory and political.
> Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”
While agreeing with where you're coming from, including this, it is also worth nothing that there is truth to what you're rejecting as well. Our longstanding unsolved domestic problems are fertile ground for nation state competitors to foment discontent, gain oppositional mindshare, and ultimately harm our overall position. The elites seem to think these problems can just be ignored or swept under the rug, when in reality the frustration grows until it boils over into highly destructive self-owns. We're already seeing this actively play out on a grand scale with general politics, but it can certainly happen in more specific ways that target things like data centers.
To be industrially competitive we need to fix our longstanding domestic problems that fall on individuals, rather than merely ignoring them. In the case of data centers - lack of effective environmental regulations around air and sound pollution, complete inability for municipalities to regulate the operations of something after it's been built, and a shortage of infrastructure that's now been privatized for use by the highest bidder.
Plus that general affordability crisis you touched upon, of course. Nobody likes the feeling that an appendage of a trillion dollar company can come to their city, wave around the promise of everything-bubble money, and make it so their own individual voice is meaningless.
Exactly. Russia has been doing it for decades and it would be foolish to assume China didn't learn from them. Thomas Rid's "Active Measures" covers this in detail, and it's somewhat maddening to read, because it details how much of the civil strife we've experienced that was exacerbated by their actions.
Blaming Russia (and China) in most cases is a cheap cop out to try to deflect, hide and minimize the actual grievances of people living in USA.
Yes, there's propaganda and most of it doesn't reach the Americans. It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented.
Not what is being claimed here and stating that shows a complete lack of understanding of the term Active Measures, the history of it, and what the book of the same name discusses.
Also, it's amusing you think you know my political leanings or that it would somehow affect the accuracy of what is being discussed. It's strange how people think that they can win arguments by casting the person they're debating into some group they've decided is already wrong.
Anyways, go google the term and then pretend like you knew what it was all along and that you're an expert on Russian influence campaigns of the 20th and 21st centuries. That works well on Twitter and Reddit, maybe it'll work here too?
Which do you think involves more cognitive dissonance to work through - liberals accepting the country has problems they might be out of touch with, or reactionaries accepting they've sold the country down the river?
> They’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.
One thing that has near radicalized me is the rampant dishonesty on this subject. Data center builders/users have the audacity to tell me that my rates aren't going up, but also if they are it isn't their fault, but even if it is their fault they will actually lower my rates in the long term (but somehow, never promising to pay us back for the damage in the short term).
It really, really bothers me how slimy the people doing this are.
This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy.
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here.
My country banned all hyperscalers. Has nothing to do with China- I live in a densely populated country that doesn't need the chump change from Google and Microsoft.
Ugly giant buildings that take up valuable land and require lots of infrastructure meanwhile providing no jobs are a very bad deal.
Yeah. IMO anyone arguing (explicitly or otherwise) that these facilities don't come with enormous negative externalities for people unlucky enough to live near them is either ignorant or being disingenuous. There is no need to lean on contentious minutiae like the water usage thing to show that this is true.
If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them.
Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).
Not saying these are correct and are proof, but this isn't some fringe concern from the MAGA crowd or something. It would also be a logical response on China's part to the US working to block them from getting GPUs, processor tech, etc.
It’s more than one thing. Yes there’s definitely some populism and maybe some astroturfing from outside groups - but actual electricity costs are going up and the average consumer can’t really get anymore efficient, so they’re indirectly subsidizing this stuff. Computers and related hardware have gone up in price. And then you’ve got all of the “AI layoffs” that also result in real-world pain.
But that would simply result in Most Americans don't want AI Data Centers, which isn't the same as NYMBYism. I think many Americans see the benefits of having access to unicorn farts and may even support having more data centers. Just not in my backyard, thank you.
(Ftr. the article doesn't have an opinion on whether Americans like AI, just my take.)
DCs have a tendency to destabilize the local grid and drive up grid rates and have ridiculous water consumption requirements, both largely externalized to the surrounding community, so it's more a matter of basic self-defense than any notional populist agenda.
Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town.
(On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)
Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.
They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
where does the noise pollution come from? GPU fans? What's more noisy about a DC filled with CPUs and GPUs than a DC filled with just CPUs. I can imagine generators being noisy but that wouldn't be anything different than regular data centers. Also, so few DCs for the AI buildout are actually online where are the noise measurements taken from?
I understand if people don't want a DC near them i just don't understand why they care now. I have some pretty big ones about 3miles from me and next door to both are residential areas and businesses. In fact, some of the biggest ones where i live (Dallas) are so understated you have to know it's a datacenter beforehand to even realize what you're looking at. There are some really large ones in Carrolton TX that are nestled right up to neighborhoods, i bet 95% of the people don't even know they're there and the 5% that do probably work there or host there.
Society hasn't felt the very real effects of data centers until recently. Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. We've started to learn just how bad all those dams we built are for the environment and many of them are tied to data center money. Elon Musk waltzed into Memphis and stood up a natural gas data center that has basically poisoned the surrounding area.
Maybe nation state actors are helping, that can always be true. It is also true that the American people are starting to realize they've been had many times over and are just starting to ask for a better deal. I think we should listen.
> Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users.
Maybe some kind of progressive pricing for power would be appropriate. I'm not sure if this exists, and correct me if it does, but maybe the second MW should cost an order of magnitude more then the first, and so on.
If only we had a limitless form of energy that comes out of the sky. Or if that doesn't work, maybe there's some miraculous form of energy that can be extracted from rocks, produces no emissions whatsoever, and could power society for thousands of years.
Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.
The data center construction boom has precipitated a lot of inflation in electronics and related fields, because the data centers are buying out all of the silicon manufacturing and RAM manufacturing and etc, and all of this stuff is horribly supply-limited. And the people pushing for data center construction are proudly telling us that we need to support this so that we can put half of the population out of work, oh, and we just need a small trillion-dollar subsidy or five to pay for it all (because demand for AI isn't high enough to pay for all of it themselves).
There's no need to invent some malign foreign conspirator to generate unpopularity for this stuff. No, the AI companies are led by unpopular CEOs, who are making unpopular statements (almost cartoonishly so). And opposing a data center is the kind of action that regular people, upset about this sort of stuff, feel that they can actually meaningfully effect. So of course it was going to balloon like it has.
I made this comment a little bit ago, I'll share it again:
I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story.
Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.
> I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
ok now this is something i understand and haven't thought about, thank you. I've visited the stargate construction site in Abilene TX since it's not too far from me (3hrs). The scale is indeed unlike any DC i've ever seen before.
edit: "...howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" .." you're talking about XAI's data centers in Memphis right? I don't think that's a fair comparison, that was knocked together in like 100 days. Those generators are on trailers.
Wow it's almost like modern datacenters use way more power due to GPU consumption. Emit way more pollution. Use way more land. Make way more noise. Produce slop instead of functioning products. Do yall use your brain before chiming in and misinforming everyone?
I hear and understand those, but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?
Ambient noise must be contained, excess heat must be mitigated, free hot water must be provided to nearby buildings. etc. Also this is a city's opportunity to do something like assess penalty tax points. (ie, datacenter usage tax, just like we do to hotels)
> I hear and understand those, but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?
It's a waste of time and money for each town and county to come up with those requirements. If your community puts any limits on the datacenter builder they'll just build it somewhere else, so you might as well save the effort and just say they can't do it.
the US is a republic of states. By design it wastes time and money to allow disagreement, variety, and self-determination of states.
> they'll just build it somewhere else
Why should we have rights to say they cannot do it somewhere else? It's not a moral issue, it's a tragedy of commons issue or unpriced externality issue.
what seems to be happening in practice is that the companies building these data centers will just take you to court over the limits being illegal and make that fight cost more than the town's entire annual budget, thus inducing the town to give up.
isn't that their freedom to? And the right/freedom of those who democratically created the low regulation environment?
I do not understand this idea that someone from one place should have their preferences taking precedence the preferences, rights and freedoms of folks who actually live in another place.
The main caveat being the boundary lines, but i think that's very much an edge case.
> but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?
It's America. They don't do regulations there.
The more serious answer is that this political movement is leading to more strict regulation being enacted, it just wasn't in place because of reason #1 and the problems being much less severe.
Additionally, the tech industry is notoriously hostile to any kind of regulation. Especially now with AI. Just look at how many people in this thread will insist that it's "Chinese Propaganda", despite clear evidence that this is just a response to the actual problems datacenters cause. One news crew interviewing people with jet turbine noise will do more than a million of Beijing's finest trolls.
Why is that a problem? It might raise the temp within a few hundred feet of the chillers by 0.5-1F which is substantially less than an urban heat island temp delta vs surrounding rural land.
A sane municipality will require sound mitigation on generators, chillers, and other loud equipment. Sure, there are shitty places that don’t take care of their citizens that will let you run natural gas turbines to generate power, but it’s possible to contain the bad effects of data centers with local and state regulations.
I’ll take a data center that evaporates water to replace the iron casting foundry in my neighborhood any day.
You can buy chillers with enclosures that limit the sound to a reasonable volume, Google “chiller noise attenuation”. You can add walls around lots of chillers to further limit the noise.
If the data center follows the city statutes for noise levels at the property line that exist in my municipality, then sure, I’ll take the data center above the iron foundry.
> Power usage is massive
The utility can approve or deny the connection. Data centers in areas without any available power are not getting grid connections.
There's also a lot of people lashing out without knowing anything about data centers because they think AI is loser shit, and data centers have become a rallying point.
Your edit really illustrates what's wrong with all of this. We can't even get computers to reasonably assume what we're trying to say. But somehow the ultra rich have decided to devote all global resources to doing bad autocorrect for everything everywhere and calling it AI.
They probably would be awful to have a house next to, but which if the hyperscale data center proposals are near residential areas?
The really large data centers have to go into areas with a lot of land and utility connections. These are usually zoned commercial or industrial already.
I heard about one in northern virginia which seems to be the front lines in this debate. It has onsite power generation which seems to be going 24/7 which is positively awful if you have to live next to that.
First thing missing from this "article" is a number indicating how many people don't want AI datacentres anywhere. You can't claim that someone is a NIMBY if their stance is that the damned thing shouldn't be built anywhere.
It could be argued that the article tendentiously paints this as a "not in my backyard" issue in order to normalize NIMBY outlook, conflating building AI data centres with building housing.
The whole world is California, and the most important thing we can do is pack more and more people into the same space. People from here, people from there. We want more crowdedness, and everyhing that comes with it: crime, noise, pollution, lack of social cohesion. Everything. Every place must be like this, and everything must grow forever.
Negatives acknowledged, there are huge efficiency upsides to dense human living. Everything becomes smoother, faster, less wasteful. You get a society that leverages economies of scale for everything.
In some areas, density is appropriate, and in some areas it's not. I wish we could talk about housing density and "build more housing" as if there was not one universal solution that worked everywhere and for everyone. Dense urban living is not appropriate in a rural or suburban town. Single family homes are not appropriate in a high-demand urban area. Different people want different things, too. No matter how efficient and good for the environment it is, I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.
> I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.
Yes, this is the crux. Loud, smelly, concrete cities suck. And you’re right that density alone would lead to this.
What we’d ideally want is cities that can be dense without being loud, smelly, and dangerous. These cities exist: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Zurich, Utrecht, Freiburg, etc.
We can’t do this in the US because we can’t remove the source of the noise/danger/stink/concrete problem: cars.
And that’s the catch 22: In the US everyone gets around by car, so density becomes undesirable. We can’t densify because density + cars is bad, and we can’t reduce cars because it’s not dense enough for public transit to get better.
Individuals get stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma where driving is safer, more comfortable, and faster than transit. So every individual with the means to drive chooses to drive. Public transit becomes branded as something for poor people. The concrete honeycomb fills up. The downtown becomes a noisy disaster. People can no longer imagine that good cities are possible.
I know I kicked off this discussion, but I have also bemoaned many times about the anti-car people being quasi religious in their anti-worship of cars. They talk about it like missionaries talk about jesus.
The only difference between a rural or suburban town and the sprawl of a city is time, really. Lots of modern urban areas used to be suburban or essentially rural.
Anyway if you densify cities you can slow down the sprawl and maybe keep suburbs actually smaller? a few more ten story apartment blocks downtown might house the people who have to live in your area and commute.
This is a theoretical ideal, where we ignore people's desire to own large tracts of land and live in quiet places. A mega-city where all the humans human, and then massive tracts of untouched wilderness shy of any industry that has to be there.
This is also why communist countries had stuff like dense housing in deeply rural areas, and why most people were shuffled into cities. Big houses and properties do nothing for the state and just encumber society. Way easier if everyone just lives in their tightly packed central shoe box.
We could also fit more people in if you crushed everyone, dehydrated them and stored they remains in huge compressed cubes. Efficiency is not all we want
The datacenter outrage is mislabeled. It's actually zoning outrage, caused by local governments that aren't taking their citizen's concerns seriously. It just so happens that datacenters are the hottest (no pun intended) industrial construction option right now.
ChatGPT estimates for $300,000 I can build a 10x12 datacenter in my backyard with an operating breakeven at 29% utilization and 489 year capital payback. No thanks, not in my back yard.
America is so massive, these trillion dollar companies can surely build these out in the boonies with very few people around?
ETA: I would rather no data centers be built, but my point is if we have to, let’s minimize the number of people who are affected. Offer to move them if need be.
It's generally more expensive for them when it comes to things like power, water and internet.
Boonies have very poor in each of those and building it up would take too long so throw another in Northern Virginia since they have expensive access to additional of that but at least it will become operational.
And ruin the boonies too? American norms and laws are not conducive to making nice places to live, but they've skated by having enough land and car-first infrastructure. With the huge increase in warehouses and data centers in residential areas over the past 5-10 years, I wonder if there will be an inflection point where it finally needs to be dealt with.
Even then they can wind up in the proverbial backyard. I don't know much about data center staffing needs and zoning laws but those would seem relevant spatial constraints and considerations.
I wonder the same thing. It could be that getting transition grid interconnects and redundant fiber paths is much faster in more suburban areas vs rural areas.
A lot of the big companies are massively allergic to building infrastructure, even when they get government grants to do it. Look at how badly the broadband rollout was bungled. Shot their own foot at this point.
We could in a vacuum, but they require human labor and human labor isn't found in the boonies.
It's the age old problem. The people in the cities cry that there are no jobs and the rural businesses cry that they can't find anyone to hire, with no great resolution as the businesses cannot afford to move into the city and the people don't want to travel to the boonies.
However, in this case, these data centers are so well capitalized that they can afford to move them into the cities right beside where the workers are located.
They need to hire IT, maintainence, and security to run the datacenters, and there aren't many qualified people in the boonies. Small towns are better targets, and honestly also just objectively less damaging to the environment.
None of this NIMBYism is about the datacenter itself, it's all a protest against AI making the economy really shitty for them.
Sounds like they should build the equivalent of a little mining town out in the boonies too and start working on the housing crisis simultaneously. “Move to Nowhere, USA, and get cheap, new housing and a good-paying job” would get them the talent they want.
EDIT: yes, I know mining towns had their own share of problems (I’ve heard “16 tons” too), but knowing the hazards of the past, I think we can figure out a more equitable structure with this kind of setup.
Mining towns used to work in the days when one parent worked full-time and one parent raised kids full-time, and job security, unions, and pensions were a thing.
In modern times, both parents often have career ambitions, and the modern capitalist economy and housing pricing has greedily recalibrated to every family needing two incomes. So you're not going to have many families willing to move to the boonies unless you (at the bare minimum) hand out doubly-high salaries.
Very likely that's not enough though, as it's also a massive financial risk to them if you can just lay them off after the next earnings report with no pension to continue supporting them. Most modern families would rather stay where jobs are slightly more likely to exist.
> “Move to Nowhere, USA, and get cheap, new housing and a good-paying job”
These types of opportunities already exist but are rarely taken up upon. More of them means more jobs unfilled.
When those mining towns were the way of the world people moved around a lot more. It was no big deal to pack your bags and move there. While census data only started being collected from the 1950s onward, it is estimated that ~40% of the population would move in a given year at the hight of the mining booms. Even in the 1950s, when we started collecting concrete data, around 30% of the population would move in a given year. Now only around 8% of the population will move in a given year.
Nowadays there is an expectation that you can stay put. For example, if you watch housing affordability discussions closely you'll notice the theme is always "I cannot afford a house where I am currently located", not "I cannot afford a house anywhere in the world". Attitudes about living arrangements have changed as compared to the past and the AI companies are not about to change it back any time soon. They have to work with people they want to hire, and that means putting the work where the people are already found.
You need on the order of 15 permanent onsite employees to run a datacenter; 5 each for 24/7 coverage of security, building maintenance, and tech. You probably don't really need 24/7 onsite for building maintenance or tech. Traveling employees or (probably traveling) contractors can handle projects that exceed the local scope.
Should be able to locally source security and building maintenance, if the pay is good. These are skills that are needed everywhere. The onsite tech can likely be sourced locally too: first and foremost, they're remote hands ... knowledgeable remote hands are nicer, but the mandatory skills are: read and follow directions, notice and report unusual circumstances, lift and manipulate heavy objects. It's not rocket surgery.
If you put your datacenter in the near boonies, say 30 minutes away from the nearest suburb, you can usually still find the big lots you need, and people can commute from there: a 30 minute commute with no traffic isn't too awful. Of course, you'll have neighbors on large lots who didn't think through that living out on the boonies with no zoning meant noisy neighbors could move in. :P
I don't consider 30 minutes away from town the "boonies", that's more like a normal commute. The boonies would be like a 3 hour drive in the Sonora desert.
Well, "boonies" is pretty ill defined, but my criteria is most homes are are 10+ acre lots, and large lots are widely available.
You want your datacenter to be in reach of interstate highways (rail might be nice, too), two electrical substations [1], and close to fiber that's already run. That restricts your available boonies, but there's still lots outside of the east coast.
[1] yes, you'll have onsite generation, and yes, you might plan to run from onsite generation most of the time, but you still want to have the option for utility power, and it's nice to have two substations to get more uptime, subject to more transfer switch complexity.
While most people wouldn't hesitate to travel 30 minutes out of town, the generally don't ever think to see if jobs exist 30 minutes out of town, and thus won't find the work there. When looking for work they search within the city they live in, not the next town over with a name they might not even know. This is a real problem for a lot of businesses that exist 30 minutes out of town.
In fairness, the companies behind these data centres are well known and have endless marketing budgets, so they can likely find a way to close that gap where the typical rural-based business cannot, but at the same time why take the risk when you can just as easily build the datacenter right beside the person you want to hire?
I mean, typically you just list your job in the nearby major city, even when the site address isn't there. Same thing that you do when listing your hotel or your car for sale.
30 minutes out of town isn't nearby anymore. The highways are surprisingly efficient. And consider that it is more like a 1-1.5 hour drive for someone living on the opposing end of the city — possibly more if it is a large city. Advertising a job 1.5 hours away as if it is local doesn't tend to win you any admiration from job seekers. Maybe AI companies are prominent enough that they can piss off workers and still hire them in the end, but that doesn't fly for most businesses.
But, again, why take the risk when you can just as easily put the work right beside the workers?
I don’t think any of these examples represent _successful_ opposition, though. Except maybe the warming center for homeless people? I can’t tell if it got built or not.
These examples basically amount to “some people didn’t like this”, which doesn’t mean that the balance of public opinion wasn’t favourable. Unanimous support is too high a bar.
Simple, make it legally required that all new datacenters being built by <LLM_COMPANY> is built in the literal backyard of the primary residence of the children of the Csuites of said <LLM_COMPANY>.
Everyone should be in support of this idea.
Everyone else gets to be free from datacenter pollution, and the Csuites get their datacenters.
I find what people want from the data center build-out is pretty reasonable:
1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house.
2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid.
3. Don't burn the earth with CO2.
4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance.
5. Pay a lot of taxes.
But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.
What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters
1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles.
2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent.
3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good.
4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty.
5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.
Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.
I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.
It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.
Just require them to also pay for a new local power plant with the capacity to cover them before they get building permits, honestly. Maybe say they can't qualify for tax breaks too?
Absolutely this. If you think about different types of objections to nearby data centers and do some pretty minimal research, you come up with a reasonable set of solutions that most people would agree on.
That's not what people are doing though. People are genuinely afraid for the future, and much of the data center backlash is driven by emotion. You can see this reflected in populist political movements. People have a (well-founded) sense that those in power don't have their interests in mind and they're lashing out without much thought.
And the owner class has already trotted out the old Red Scare “If you don’t like datacenters, you’re just doing what China wants” bullshit has a defense.
I would flip my bitch switch if a datacenter was stood up near me, where I could hear it. I am on 5 acres in rural Michigan surrounded by peace and quiet. I specifically came here for this reason. At the same time, I understand that we need datacenters. And tbh, Michigan is under-served in this space (ex, most of my queries thru the Cloudflare network have to go to Chicago first), and I wish we had more. But not close to residential areas. Not on top of valuable farmland.
My wacky idea was that datacenters should be built on EPA superfund sites. It becomes a win-win. Datacenter gets land that humans cannot occupy, helps/funds partial cleanup, slaps a big ass concrete building down on top of the rest of the mess and kills two birds with one stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
>Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
Geothermal heating/cooling exists because deep down in the soil temperatures are fairly constant. And the earth is a fantastic insulator both in temperature and sound. Aside from the cost of digging a giant hole, there really is no reason not to be doing this.
.. and are completely ignored. The mighty nimby seems to be very nimble as soon as economic interests are involved. Very strange.. i thought he was the mighty preventer of all things changing. Especially the plotholes.. eh potholes and buses and rail..
The other day I was talking with two friends—one programmer, one musician, both of fairly conservative political persuasion—and the topic of “AI data centers” came up. I said something to the effect of, “y'know, all that talk about how they just use all up all the water from wherever they're built is total propaganda nonsense, right?” and both were genuinely taken aback by this statement. As far as they were concerned, “AI data centers” were something a Captain Planet villain would build, just absolute ecological disasters, inherently. I'm relatively neutral when it comes to this stuff but man, the propaganda against “AI data centers” really works!
I love the idea of a Captain Planet villain having some underling crunch the numbers to choose the optimal place to build dozens of AI data centers such that there's just enough water available for them to use, but then by using said water, it conveniently destroys any and all local ecologies and human communities in the process, cackling all the while—it's so completely divorced from reality that it makes perfect sense that average people living in the mediabrained modern hellscape of today would believe that to be the case.
I don't know what agenda you're going with, but it isn't reality. They're destroying water tables. I'll leave this link here for you to read if you're brave enough to step outside your Captain Planet cartoon narrative and have an actual look at the water consumption problem.
Why am I supposed to take a janky-ass web visualization, completely devoid of citations as far as I can tell, and which was, itself, almost certainly vibecoded, at face value, as a valid argument?
I love how you went from posting links to articles to make arguments for you, to then editing your comment to link to a $250 book that I should buy and read, so it can make your argument for you.
Refusing to acknowledge sources is pathetic. The information directly refutes your cartoonish take on the problem if you're brave enough to pull yourself into reality.
Trust the Experts who have done Studies and written Papers in Committees their objective view of reality not to mention their morality is superior to yours yadda yadda heard it all before
You don't need to put in a lot of effort to convince people that creepy, deceitful, generally unlikable, rich folks are doing things you won't like and are lying to get away with it.
It seems downright dishonest to focus so much on Loudon County VA, which is DC's major tech hub and has the highest median income of any county in the US. It is definitely dishonest to not mention any demographic or historical details.
You definitely do not want a sewage treatment plant in your backyard. But hey, you got a cheaper home price so that the rich guys can pump their crap to your backyard from miles away.
IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards. Maybe those standards should rise to include ambient noise requirements, heat dissipation, capital contributions to water/electricity supply, additional tax burden points (for land use without, maybe?).
But I also feel there needs to be an assertion that if you own the land it's your property and you're free to do most things with it, safely and politely. This is about property rights and freedoms.
Your property rights stop where my ears are. Or I have the freedom to not listen to your gas turbine. Or however one wishes to flip that on its head. Whether you own the property or not, that property isn’t in a vacuum.
Your property rights end when corporations, who get sick of your obstinance, simply place some strategic election donations and soon enough you’re up against eminent domain.
That is all covered by my point about regulations rising to the task. Did you read the whole comment?
The point is you should be allowed to have a gas turbine (or whatever generator meets the requirements), if it meets emissions, noise, and heat regulations.
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hops. But there are examples of data centers being approved with minimal public comment, if any. Musk’s data center in Memphis is frequently trotted out, and for good reason. When the “as long as” part takes place, we can discuss the legality of NIMBY.
> IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards.
NIMB is part of setting those standards.
In a nearby town, the city was planning on putting a moratorium on new data centers, and so a lot of companies rushed their application in before the moratorium start date. They all got approved. The local citizens got really mad that they were approved, and the city simply said "Look: We legally cannot deny them permits if they're conforming to current requirements."
So yes, you're right. And yes, your statement is mostly irrelevant. NIMBYism is always about the future requirements. It's not as if enacting a rule disallowing high density residences will force existing ones to be torn down.
Rather than making everyone comply with the strictest noise and other restrictions of residential areas, it's much easier for everyone if you put industrial things in an industrial area and residences in a residential area.
Good luck upgrading your home’s electrical service to charge an EV, only to be told it’s impossible because the nearby data center has already consumed all the available grid capacity.
Happened to family of mine. Not in the US though. They charge their EV with a 3kW charger now.
That is an invested capital issue. If it's not worth building a plant, they wont. The supply will fall until the prices rise enough to incentivize new plants. If the elec prices rise enough the datacenters will find alternate solutions .
It seems like people are some how railing against basic economics?
Like if we dont like it we have a marketplace of alternatives, the opportunity to invest in new supply, and the choice to not consume said energy if the price is too high...
I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them. The newer ones are using on-site generators that are insanely loud and require multiples more power than datacenters have historically needed. For a rack with traditional servers with just RAM/CPU/Drives, 5kW is sufficient in most cases.
When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.
I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.
I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.
Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.
> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries. They're starting to learn about the effect consistent noise at that level has on their mental & physical well-being as well.
> The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries.
Do they? How much noise do you imagine comes from a data center that isn't operating a gas turbine?
I believe there’s been a number of investigative journalists/ YouTubers that have looked into this and it can be quite staggering. Not just human audible noise but infrasound and ultrasound as well. IIRC Ben Jordan’s video “ Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons” would probably be a good place to start.
They could build these data centers to eliminate the noise but it’s cheaper to ruin the livability of surrounding areas.
Town by me had a huge outcry about a proposed data center and how it would ruin the area. Funnily enough there's already data centers on the same street!
The Pittsburgh steel mills provided jobs and a sense of purpose to communities.
Something that tech bros fundamentally oppose.
I think AOC made this point easy to understand in a recent hearing..
"ask ... if they [Zuckerberg, Thiel etc] want one of these data centers in their own backyard"
I think there's truth to what you're saying but I also think there's truth to what people are experiencing and perceiving.
A highly power and/or water consumptive data center being installed in a town or city is pretty much a perfect embodiment of people's frustrations. It consumes tons of power and/or water and therefore drives up utility costs for the locals or pollutes the air with diesel exhaust. And it doesn't create jobs so it's just frankly some rich cabal of capitalists getting richer while people's lives continue to feel materially worse. I can't think of a better embodiment of the sort of confluence of crumminess that seems to be underway.
I've heard talk from some folks telling these people that their concerns about data center water use, power, noise etc. are overblown. Water companies disagree, saying data center water usage in fact is quite significant. Oops. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/21/not-enou...
> In May, a House of Lords report said England faced a 5bn litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055.
> Water UK estimated that datacentres in England use 6.6m litres of drinking water every day.
> England’s current water shortfall is 220m litres more a day than was assumed in water forecasts.
https://www.tumblr.com/geneseelibby/35053843499/a-horrible-m...
Amazingly, they managed to _undersell_ the ill effects that the oil industry would have on even just the US, such as the oil-driven military actions we've taken over the years.
> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
A new class of oligarchs are trying to obsolete every profession and human endeavor for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. You don't need a PhD in environmental policy or domain expertise in construction to listen to what AI advocates are saying and realize their success comes at the expense of society, and say "no thank you."
Data center construction is not a proxy for powerlessness, but the vanguard of the powerful.
In Nashville they messed up by trying to build one next to the zoo, a beloved and popular attraction (higher attendance than our NFL franchise). The public outcry was swift and effective, new zoning rules were passed last night. https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/07/21/nashville-data-center...
That's great for future sites, but how is that going to improve the zoo's situation?
From reading the article, it sounds like one of the three items passed was an extension of a moratorium on data center building specifically for the area around the zoo. Another item involves eminent domain for the city to buy the land next to the zoo for use as city office space instead. So it pretty directly impacts the zoo's situation.
ah, I misread the comment as the data center was built by the zoo. skimmed past the "trying to" detail
It's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs.
I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.
> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.
This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.
Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.
Site selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.
I don’t understand why they’re doing this? Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive they’d rather build on top or right next to housing? Is it the water supply ? I don’t understand why someone would do something so clearly self defeating
> Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive
Yes.
Source: learned more than I want to about solar farm development.
Anytime you see someone repeatedly doing a bad thing the reason they're doing it is because they want to do it and there are isn't sufficient push-back or consequences for doing it.
Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening.
Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.
Is there really demand for 4000 plus data centers? I have a feeling that's shooting a bit above the mark (10x).
The whole thing is a motte and bailey game. The largest of cloud companies might build a data center which is 1GW. There won't be 4000 of those and it won't be next to your house. A huge number of commercial office buildings already have a 100kW data center in them, and have for decades, without anyone having any reason to know or care. For those 4000 is certainly an underestimate.
If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.
> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now
Point to _any_ analysis that says the current building boom is anything but speculation.
xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too.
DC buildout is purely a gold rush. A play to be the one left standing after all the weaker players die.
> xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too.
You’re probably thinking of Meta. Google renting GPUs is a less recent phenomenon, to say the least.
xAI is renting out compute
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-2...
Speculative demand is still demand.
Speculation isn't a dirty word and both can be true.
Demand is very high today and exceeds capacity. Builders think demand will continue to grow. This seems plainly correct. Firms may differ in how high demand will go, but it is still more than today.
You are trying to pick a fight with a post that isn't making the point you assume it is. All that guy is saying is that there is a rush to build them, which is objectively true.
Whether or not the datacenters return on the investment is a different question.
There's a demand for data centers, but maybe not a demand for actual usages of the data centers. That's the distinction I think they were trying to make by pointing to existing data centers not even being used to full capacity in-house (and being rented out instead).
They could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.
I wonder how long till they start scooping up old abandoned towns?
That's what they should do. Datacenters don't need to be in anyone's backyard. The US has vast amounts of unused land as well as urban brownfields that are sitting empty. Put them there.
Heck, abandoned means those power generators are ripe for it, and that power plant you want to build? You've got the room!
You're not getting it into an urban brownfield unless it comes with price controls on energy.
I live amongst the urban brownfields of Baltimore and our politicians are under tons of pressure to stop data center projects (and to tar and feather utility executives).
>(and to tar and feather utility executives)
Has anyone thought about perhaps tar and feathering the politicans and bureaucrats that wrote all the rules that make greenfield development with a transmission line tap a non-starter?
The developers would looooove to not deal with brownfields, not have pissed off neighbors, not deal in complex urban sites, etc, but greenfield above a tiny size is effectively outlawed piecemeal in many states.
Yes, the AI Datacenters are much worse for the environment. xAI is using methane-turbines to power theirs, and they are allowed to pollute your communities because they bribed the Trump admin.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/elon-musk-... https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1014655584252361
I have some degree of sympathy for data centers, and anyone else that needs power, only because of how broken our regulatory state is on approving new transmission.
To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear.
If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.
The country first and foremost should serve all its citizens. Not just wealthy people and not just people of the dominant ethnic background. The xAI data centers sits right next to a poor african american community and Musk used emergency turbines that were not designed for continuous daily use. He utilized a loophole to get past those restrictions. Those turbines are burning gasses inefficiently and producing a lot of pollution that is directly harming those residents who likely don't even materially benefit from all this effort.
These people likely had nothing to do with the delay in solar installs, or decades of nuclear NIMBYism yet now because Musk cannot fall behind, they now have to suffer with no one in government caring about them.
Its a real life hell, they cannot physically resist or cause any trouble or else the government will come and kill them where they stand, they cannot afford to move away because who would buy their houses (and why should they abandon their life's community for something they had no part in?) so they sit and suffer day after day with declining health for their family. Framed like this, Musk is like a locust who has come to devour whatever good there was and then move onto the next prey.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. The datacenter I used to work at ran off the grid and was essentially quiet.
Lol. A data center is no more than a industrial bread bakery (oddly specific i know). The entire anti-data US center is ran by China. EG. You can run a rack of servers in your closet. China is doing a great job.
Are you sure about that? I can't think of any bread bakeries pulling 2.2 gigawatts, which is us-east-1 pulls.
There are industrial bakeries that burn that much natural gas (powerwise); although the bakery probably smells better.
I can attest for the smells better. Now, I'm left wondering which smells worse, an AI datacenter or a large beer brewery. As a kid, we had a Mrs. Baird's bread bakery which was in the heart of town that students would take field trips to see (which is no longer there and is now apartments). On the other side of town is a Budweiser plant, and it's infamous for being so odorific but it is located way the hell out there.
What bakery are you thinking of that pulls the equivalent of a mid sized nuclear power plant? Because you’re off by an order of magnitude I think. (2.2MW maybe)
I suspect the Nabisco plant in Chicago pulls about ~12 million therms worth of natural gas, at 30kwh per therm, that's pretty significant.
A quick google says that the entire city of Chicago draws about 3.4GW - are you saying that one bakery uses over 2/3 of the draw of the entire city?
No, he is saying that if they were to replace natural gas with electricity, it would use 2.2 gigawatts of electricity.
I don't think the conversion is as straightforward as they claimed. But they're also not claiming that they currently pull gigawatts of electricity.
You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.
Shrug
You asked about energy usage; but I have no idea as to how that bakery's natural gas usage affects the people surrounding it.
The smell of freshly baked fig newtons might offset the possible increased cost of gas-per-cubic-foot.
I guess we can go the long way round. How often does the bakery use 12 million therms of natural gas?
ok, but like, my stove uses some therms of natural gas, but its not at all comparable in terms of scale to a data center.
what makes this bakery comparable in terms of energy usage and pollution?
If you're complaining about us-east-1, you either moved into its backyard or didn't know it existed there for 20 years.
Don't think there was a complaint as you're interpreting. It was just an example of known power usage.
You need cooling, power, and at the data center I used to work at they literally ran out of power and couldn't get any more from the city. They actually built a new building in the parking lot so they had cause to request more power
https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo
Adversaries are happy to rule up democracies in any way possible, and it is foolish to think that there are zero concerns about placement of AI datacenters.
Lol the entire pro-data US center is ran by elon musk and the other cronies that bribed the Trump admin to let them violate the clean air act. They use gullible losers that will swallow their propaganda whole and promise them "AGI."
I agree that I don’t want a data center in my backyard either.
What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
I tried to look for one in my state and a few surrounding areas and couldn’t find any. There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
There was another story about a small town without any major electricity or communication infrastructure coming together to impose a moratorium on data center construction. There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all, but they felt so threatened that they needed to convene and put on a big show about banning it.
The social phenomenon of the data center construction protest movement is really fascinating. My assumption is that it will run its course and then be mostly dropped when the next current thing comes along.
There are some actual concerns about using natural gas instead of trying to utilize the optimal power sources or locations, but they’re mostly overshadowed by bogeyman complaints like thinking that a data center is going to end up in your backyard or water consumption that is negligible compared to golf courses and swimming pools.
> There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all
You have to be fair on this though. The time to ban something is before they start talking about doing it, not after. Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.
I'd like to add some extra strong emphasis/support to your post:
>Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.
It's not merely "never a bad thing", for certain tools like zoning it is, at least in the jurisdictions I know of, required to be well ahead and consistently enforced. It's not something towns are allowed to do retroactively, if you have no proper legal town plan/zoning setup in place as well as various ordinances like noise then by default the only controls are the relatively weak state ones. There are many things a government is allowed to do if it's part of an overall plan that applies to all equally, but not if it's "we just don't like those guys specifically", and the best way to demonstrate that is to be making no special moves around a given arrival at all but rather to have it all setup.
Of course, there are as you suggest lots of other good reasons to be ahead too. It's a lot easier to consider things thoroughly and get community agreement when there isn't massive time pressure or lobbying going on and emotions aren't running high. It's easier to get some expert consultation at reasonable prices (in some cases there may even be community members with the skills and willingness to volunteer if it's not a time crush), to enact longer term infrastructure plans, to get any state approval if needed, etc etc. But there are legally serious hard lines as well and if towns are caught napping they may just not be able to use them at all.
The interesting thing about the anecdote wasn't the timing. It was that there was no reason to build a data center there but they felt compelled to make it their top priority.
> especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure.
Small, remote towns without electricity or data connections are not easily exploited for data centers.
Are we really expecting small town residents to have sophisticated enough prediction powers to know if a bigco company might target their town for a data center build? What's the cost of a false negative vs. a false positive for them? Better safe than sorry applies in spades here.
I don't think anyone's talking about towns where electricity is absent or expensive.
Instead it's locations that begin with cheap electricity (attracting the datacenter) but the residents fear a significant increase in electricity costs with no local economic benefits to offset it.
My take is that people feel powerless to really do anything against these massive tech companies. This is the only tangible way they can fight back.
I might believe that if the protests weren't being organized on Facebook and then posted to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
It's more like garbage dumps. People don't want to moderate their production of garbage, they just don't want any consequences of it to be too close to their house.
"I see you're complaining about society and yet you participate in society! Very interesting! I am very smart."
This is not a good or reasoned take. People organize where the other people are because that's how you get the most people. It is nor hypocrisy to use Facebook as a platform to organize protests against other tech companies. Just as it is not hypocrisy to criticize the society you live within.
This is a very stupid observation made by people who can't be bothered to consider the realities of life away from their keyboard.
It is a good or reasoned take (but perhaps not both!). There is some sliver of hypocrisy in condemning tech companies wholesale while enjoying their products. But just because something is hypocritical, it doesn't invalidate all related criticisms. If you don't like the negative byproducts of a good or service, that's a perfectly valid gripe. But those byproducts are a necessary consequence of the status quo. In order to eliminate or mitigate the undesired consequences, some change would need to occur in the real world that would require a hitherto unforeseen innovation or it would otherwise increase the cost of providing the good or service, potentially so much so that prices would increase to undesirable levels, or it would become economically unviable to produce the good or service entirely. So without more specific criticism, and combined with polemic rhetoric, it's reasonable to assume that some are arguing that the world would be better off without AI datacenters and the models they support entirely. And if those same persons enjoy those same services, it's reasonable to sense some tension there. Maybe they haven't thought the whole thing through. I don't think it's a stupid observation.
Yea, there's probably not one single issue that people are fed up with, but datacenters have become lightning rods that represent big tech's disproportionate power over us, job-displacing AI, and are a visible example of how municipalities that we elect--serve and prioritize companies from out of town over their voters.
I wouldn't want a GPU datacenter close to my house either.
They should buy land in middle of nowhere, many miles from any closest town, no less than 5. And they should build and provide their own electricity.
I don't see any other solution to make everyone coexist in peace.
Imagine it was your house a mile from such a monster. Eyesore, noisy.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but a town near me has a few data centers, and the anti-datacenter sentiment precedes their use for LLMs.
They simply take a lot of space, and the city gave sweet tax deals, and they employ almost no one. The locals aren't happy with that type of land use.
> What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.
Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?
It's easy for politicians to support a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody will really oppose it, and it's a safe way to appear to be "fighting for the community."
And on the flip side, I live in Fairfax County, VA and there are data centers EVERYWHERE. Especially if I cross into Ashburn (home of AOL and stuff) - literally mixed in with large townhome developments.
And the current plan - building a data center in Canaan Valley - is a whopper... 785 MW natural gas power plant on site with diesel generator backups (solely for the data center, not sold back to grid), 500+ acres of land, 2 million sqft initial building space, air quality impact assessment by the state is heavily redacted, $4 billion price tag.
All right next to one of DC's most popular outdoor/skiing recreation areas. The DC would loom over the two towns that support the entire region.
>not sold back to grid)
They'd probably love to sell spare capacity back to the grid but the way interconnection is handled they'd likely be on the hook for a bunch of other upgrades to facilitate that hence why they're not.
Most of it is anti-AI sentiment, there are already a ton of people who have lost jobs, or clients to AI.
What bothers me is clearing forests, sometimes even protected forests with the idea that they'll ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
I don't think they have an interest in forgiveness. I'm not sure it's a concept in their worldview.
Does a data center need to be an immediate neighbor to raise electricity rates or consume water capacity?
This is such an obvious concern that it's hard to understand how the GP didn't think of it as well. Clearly, people don't always consider all the things and get focused in so they can't see the forest for the trees.
It also doesn't necessarily matter if the data centers actually raise electricity rates.
Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.
>It also doesn't necessarily matter if the data centers actually raise electricity rates.
>Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.
So in other words burn the credibility and reputation of whatever you're using for that purpose so you can pull a quick "fuck you got mine" to the tune of several cents per kwh off your bill.
That sort of policy making is not sustainable and is exactly the sort of selfish shortsighted thinking that birthed the current political climate.
Edit: At leas you're honest about it. The usual peddlers of such stuff are in denial about what they're doing so they can't be made to understand the tradeoffs.
As I see it, the AI companies are the ones that started the "fuck you got mine" defense. Look at how they obtained their data to train their models. Look at how they've gone about building their data centers. It's yet another example of how tech companies hurry up to get established with no regards for anything other than getting to a point of being too big to stop.
Data centers are conflated with rising energy costs.
It's partly about people's nominal objections, but mostly an attempt to hold them hostage to extract some energy bill subsidies (and general cost of living relief).
If you look at Elk Grove Village, Illinois as their budget there after declaring they would become the AI Datacenter Capital of the World -- there is an obvious answer:
Suburbs cannot continue to pay for their infrastructure without drastically increasing taxes or finding new sources of income.
> There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
How did they get in?
No one ever cared about DCs before now. I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
Ironically, There’s enough issues with the DC buildout going on that even with 100% public opinion support it would still be significantly delayed. The behind the meter power generation isn’t going well. There’s only so many gas fired turbines on the market. And connecting a DC to an established grid isn’t like clicking a button in AWS no matter how much money you have.
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement, as someone who lives in Northern Virginia and is effectively watching the Datacenter battle unfold from the front lines, and dealing with the local politics and electricity costs rising at a precipitous rate.
Our electricity bill has doubled. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors want to erect “Statue of Liberty” sized power transmission lines, and those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.
Part of the reason people care about Datacenters now is that they’re starting to litter the landscape, take resources from local municipalities, and raise costs for everyone involved, whereas previously there were not enough of them to really move the needle as being a problem.
Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”.
They're building a mass of DC's near me as well in northern IL (not quite as many as by you). I see a lot of weird stuff on social media - people inactive for years all of a sudden becoming super-activists and posting non-stop anti-DC content. Nearly identical content to what's being pushed by a bunch of faceless accounts named like "Water4All","Nature Reign" - something vaguely environmental sounding.
Talking points like:
"We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030"
It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system".
There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
nyt is no fan of AI, but they cover this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
Read the top comment.
The story never questions if they are right, simply tried to smear the argument based on the sources.
"there's no such thing as a closed loop system"
That's not incorrect though; you're still needing to shed the heat energy SOMEWHERE. Thermodynamics alone dictates that basic fact. You may not waste the cooling solution but all that excessive GPU heat is going to need to go somewhere - and the only place it ultimately goes is right into the environment.
Ever stand a bit away from a campfire because you got too warm, only to have the wind hit it and blow hot air over you? Same thought exercise applies here.
> We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030
I mean, isnt that what Karp, Thiel are openly saying and one of the things Antropic doom trolls about?
Yeah, but the thing is - those guys aren't using the majority of data center capacity out there.
The Anti-DC crowd doesn't appreciate that the surveillance state is coming with our without all these DC's being built. That is going to get hosted some where, some way. The fix is regulatory and political.
They cant make regulations. They have only limited political power, Karp and Thiel certainly have more.
So, what you say amounts to "it is true, but do nothing at all". What they do is "do the thing we can do".
You, CEOs and this crowd all agree. It ia just that some think it is a good thing (CEOs), anything except impossible is pointless (you).
It's almost as if Russia or China wants to see America not succeed.
>> This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement
You can read some of the recent reporting here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
> Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”
While agreeing with where you're coming from, including this, it is also worth nothing that there is truth to what you're rejecting as well. Our longstanding unsolved domestic problems are fertile ground for nation state competitors to foment discontent, gain oppositional mindshare, and ultimately harm our overall position. The elites seem to think these problems can just be ignored or swept under the rug, when in reality the frustration grows until it boils over into highly destructive self-owns. We're already seeing this actively play out on a grand scale with general politics, but it can certainly happen in more specific ways that target things like data centers.
To be industrially competitive we need to fix our longstanding domestic problems that fall on individuals, rather than merely ignoring them. In the case of data centers - lack of effective environmental regulations around air and sound pollution, complete inability for municipalities to regulate the operations of something after it's been built, and a shortage of infrastructure that's now been privatized for use by the highest bidder.
Plus that general affordability crisis you touched upon, of course. Nobody likes the feeling that an appendage of a trillion dollar company can come to their city, wave around the promise of everything-bubble money, and make it so their own individual voice is meaningless.
Exactly. Russia has been doing it for decades and it would be foolish to assume China didn't learn from them. Thomas Rid's "Active Measures" covers this in detail, and it's somewhat maddening to read, because it details how much of the civil strife we've experienced that was exacerbated by their actions.
https://www.amazon.com/Active-Measures-History-Disinformatio...
Blaming Russia (and China) in most cases is a cheap cop out to try to deflect, hide and minimize the actual grievances of people living in USA.
Yes, there's propaganda and most of it doesn't reach the Americans. It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented.
> "It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented."
Not what was being claimed by anyone you're possibly responding to.
Read Active Measures to actually understand what is being discussed here, assuming it's available in your country. The author isn't from the US.
> It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented.
This is not what I said at all. Try to hold more one idea in your head at once.
How is "Anyone who disagrees with me is a Russian troll" working out for you liberals?
Not what is being claimed here and stating that shows a complete lack of understanding of the term Active Measures, the history of it, and what the book of the same name discusses.
Also, it's amusing you think you know my political leanings or that it would somehow affect the accuracy of what is being discussed. It's strange how people think that they can win arguments by casting the person they're debating into some group they've decided is already wrong.
Anyways, go google the term and then pretend like you knew what it was all along and that you're an expert on Russian influence campaigns of the 20th and 21st centuries. That works well on Twitter and Reddit, maybe it'll work here too?
Which do you think involves more cognitive dissonance to work through - liberals accepting the country has problems they might be out of touch with, or reactionaries accepting they've sold the country down the river?
> They’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.
One thing that has near radicalized me is the rampant dishonesty on this subject. Data center builders/users have the audacity to tell me that my rates aren't going up, but also if they are it isn't their fault, but even if it is their fault they will actually lower my rates in the long term (but somehow, never promising to pay us back for the damage in the short term).
It really, really bothers me how slimy the people doing this are.
> No one ever cared about DCs before now.
This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy.
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...
My country banned all hyperscalers. Has nothing to do with China- I live in a densely populated country that doesn't need the chump change from Google and Microsoft.
Ugly giant buildings that take up valuable land and require lots of infrastructure meanwhile providing no jobs are a very bad deal.
Yeah. IMO anyone arguing (explicitly or otherwise) that these facilities don't come with enormous negative externalities for people unlucky enough to live near them is either ignorant or being disingenuous. There is no need to lean on contentious minutiae like the water usage thing to show that this is true.
If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them.
Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).
For those who are unaware of the claims of Chinese influence, a couple articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-nevil...
Previous coverage of Singham, who coincidentally is married to a co-founder of Code Pink:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
Not saying these are correct and are proof, but this isn't some fringe concern from the MAGA crowd or something. It would also be a logical response on China's part to the US working to block them from getting GPUs, processor tech, etc.
People seem pretty sour on big tech in general, maybe it's because, I don't know...
Data centers being directly tied to increases in our power bills.
Or CEOs talking about how they're going to get to fire everyone because of AI.
Or social media raising the political temperature.
Or all of them combined. Tech has never been so intolerable across the board.
I think its a proxy for general populist sentiment.
"These AI people are getting rich selling unicorn farts while I'm on the same pay and everything is more expensive, fuck them".
It’s more than one thing. Yes there’s definitely some populism and maybe some astroturfing from outside groups - but actual electricity costs are going up and the average consumer can’t really get anymore efficient, so they’re indirectly subsidizing this stuff. Computers and related hardware have gone up in price. And then you’ve got all of the “AI layoffs” that also result in real-world pain.
Ignore at your own peril.
But that would simply result in Most Americans don't want AI Data Centers, which isn't the same as NYMBYism. I think many Americans see the benefits of having access to unicorn farts and may even support having more data centers. Just not in my backyard, thank you.
(Ftr. the article doesn't have an opinion on whether Americans like AI, just my take.)
The best way to keep the AI people from getting rich selling unicorn farts is to not buy any unicorn farts.
DCs have a tendency to destabilize the local grid and drive up grid rates and have ridiculous water consumption requirements, both largely externalized to the surrounding community, so it's more a matter of basic self-defense than any notional populist agenda.
Are you sure that you think what you described is "populist sentiment"?
Weirdly, it sounds like populist sentiment.
> No one ever cared about DCs before now.
Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town.
(On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)
The US nationalized tik tok so the chinese couldn't influence people anymore. Apparently that didn't work?
>No one ever cared about DCs before now.
Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.
They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
where does the noise pollution come from? GPU fans? What's more noisy about a DC filled with CPUs and GPUs than a DC filled with just CPUs. I can imagine generators being noisy but that wouldn't be anything different than regular data centers. Also, so few DCs for the AI buildout are actually online where are the noise measurements taken from?
I understand if people don't want a DC near them i just don't understand why they care now. I have some pretty big ones about 3miles from me and next door to both are residential areas and businesses. In fact, some of the biggest ones where i live (Dallas) are so understated you have to know it's a datacenter beforehand to even realize what you're looking at. There are some really large ones in Carrolton TX that are nestled right up to neighborhoods, i bet 95% of the people don't even know they're there and the 5% that do probably work there or host there.
the carrolton dc https://maps.app.goo.gl/mv3wo96ZTuhRBkGy5
> No one ever cared about DCs before now.
Society hasn't felt the very real effects of data centers until recently. Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. We've started to learn just how bad all those dams we built are for the environment and many of them are tied to data center money. Elon Musk waltzed into Memphis and stood up a natural gas data center that has basically poisoned the surrounding area.
Maybe nation state actors are helping, that can always be true. It is also true that the American people are starting to realize they've been had many times over and are just starting to ask for a better deal. I think we should listen.
> Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users.
Maybe some kind of progressive pricing for power would be appropriate. I'm not sure if this exists, and correct me if it does, but maybe the second MW should cost an order of magnitude more then the first, and so on.
If only we had a limitless form of energy that comes out of the sky. Or if that doesn't work, maybe there's some miraculous form of energy that can be extracted from rocks, produces no emissions whatsoever, and could power society for thousands of years.
Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.
Oregon just passed something like this I believe. We basically charge data centers 30% more for power.
The data center construction boom has precipitated a lot of inflation in electronics and related fields, because the data centers are buying out all of the silicon manufacturing and RAM manufacturing and etc, and all of this stuff is horribly supply-limited. And the people pushing for data center construction are proudly telling us that we need to support this so that we can put half of the population out of work, oh, and we just need a small trillion-dollar subsidy or five to pay for it all (because demand for AI isn't high enough to pay for all of it themselves).
There's no need to invent some malign foreign conspirator to generate unpopularity for this stuff. No, the AI companies are led by unpopular CEOs, who are making unpopular statements (almost cartoonishly so). And opposing a data center is the kind of action that regular people, upset about this sort of stuff, feel that they can actually meaningfully effect. So of course it was going to balloon like it has.
I made this comment a little bit ago, I'll share it again:
I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story.
This is a datacenter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 I doubt many people even know its a datacenter. Its pretty much any other office building.
This is also a datacenter. I imagine just about everyone living nearby knows its a datacenter. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6
Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.
> I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
ok now this is something i understand and haven't thought about, thank you. I've visited the stargate construction site in Abilene TX since it's not too far from me (3hrs). The scale is indeed unlike any DC i've ever seen before.
edit: "...howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" .." you're talking about XAI's data centers in Memphis right? I don't think that's a fair comparison, that was knocked together in like 100 days. Those generators are on trailers.
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.
Wow it's almost like modern datacenters use way more power due to GPU consumption. Emit way more pollution. Use way more land. Make way more noise. Produce slop instead of functioning products. Do yall use your brain before chiming in and misinforming everyone?
Your dad's data centers are very different to the new GPU focused beasts.
The AI data centers consume a lot more power, and thus generate a lot more heat(equals cooling noise) per square meter.
This is the reason why it's a new problem right now.
Edit: autocorrect used breasts instead of beasts.
I hear and understand those, but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?
Ambient noise must be contained, excess heat must be mitigated, free hot water must be provided to nearby buildings. etc. Also this is a city's opportunity to do something like assess penalty tax points. (ie, datacenter usage tax, just like we do to hotels)
> I hear and understand those, but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?
It's a waste of time and money for each town and county to come up with those requirements. If your community puts any limits on the datacenter builder they'll just build it somewhere else, so you might as well save the effort and just say they can't do it.
the US is a republic of states. By design it wastes time and money to allow disagreement, variety, and self-determination of states.
> they'll just build it somewhere else
Why should we have rights to say they cannot do it somewhere else? It's not a moral issue, it's a tragedy of commons issue or unpriced externality issue.
My point is the town has three options:
1) allow the build
2) develop a set of regulations to ensure the datacenter is a "good neighbor"
3) block the build
2 & 3 have the exact same effect
>they'll just build it somewhere else
what seems to be happening in practice is that the companies building these data centers will just take you to court over the limits being illegal and make that fight cost more than the town's entire annual budget, thus inducing the town to give up.
Because the people in charge of site picking also shop for low regulation environments.
isn't that their freedom to? And the right/freedom of those who democratically created the low regulation environment?
I do not understand this idea that someone from one place should have their preferences taking precedence the preferences, rights and freedoms of folks who actually live in another place.
The main caveat being the boundary lines, but i think that's very much an edge case.
And it is the citizen's freedom to say they don't want it, the same as pig farms and oil refineries trying to build next door to them.
> but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?
It's America. They don't do regulations there.
The more serious answer is that this political movement is leading to more strict regulation being enacted, it just wasn't in place because of reason #1 and the problems being much less severe.
Additionally, the tech industry is notoriously hostile to any kind of regulation. Especially now with AI. Just look at how many people in this thread will insist that it's "Chinese Propaganda", despite clear evidence that this is just a response to the actual problems datacenters cause. One news crew interviewing people with jet turbine noise will do more than a million of Beijing's finest trolls.
Why is that a problem? It might raise the temp within a few hundred feet of the chillers by 0.5-1F which is substantially less than an urban heat island temp delta vs surrounding rural land.
A sane municipality will require sound mitigation on generators, chillers, and other loud equipment. Sure, there are shitty places that don’t take care of their citizens that will let you run natural gas turbines to generate power, but it’s possible to contain the bad effects of data centers with local and state regulations.
I’ll take a data center that evaporates water to replace the iron casting foundry in my neighborhood any day.
It's not about the heat radiating from the data center, it's about the noise generated trying to cool the beast.
The power usage is massive, and that's still a very much limited resource for which everyone competes for.
Adding to your edit: Would you feel the same about adding an AI data center on top of the iron casting foundry you already have to deal with?
You can buy chillers with enclosures that limit the sound to a reasonable volume, Google “chiller noise attenuation”. You can add walls around lots of chillers to further limit the noise.
If the data center follows the city statutes for noise levels at the property line that exist in my municipality, then sure, I’ll take the data center above the iron foundry.
> Power usage is massive
The utility can approve or deny the connection. Data centers in areas without any available power are not getting grid connections.
There's also a lot of people lashing out without knowing anything about data centers because they think AI is loser shit, and data centers have become a rallying point.
Your edit really illustrates what's wrong with all of this. We can't even get computers to reasonably assume what we're trying to say. But somehow the ultra rich have decided to devote all global resources to doing bad autocorrect for everything everywhere and calling it AI.
They're just awful to live near; the folks that are clamoring for more cheap tokens should try moving in next door to the token factory.
They probably would be awful to have a house next to, but which if the hyperscale data center proposals are near residential areas?
The really large data centers have to go into areas with a lot of land and utility connections. These are usually zoned commercial or industrial already.
Here's three links to get you started.
https://virginiamercury.com/2026/06/29/virginias-romance-wit...
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2025/0320/data-center-...
https://www.insidenova.com/news/loudoun/report-ashburn-resid...
I heard about one in northern virginia which seems to be the front lines in this debate. It has onsite power generation which seems to be going 24/7 which is positively awful if you have to live next to that.
There is a study from ASU that found they are awful to live within....1200ft of.
Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to everything
I'm not saying they should want a data center in their backyard but headline wise "not in my backyard" is true of almost everything.
First thing missing from this "article" is a number indicating how many people don't want AI datacentres anywhere. You can't claim that someone is a NIMBY if their stance is that the damned thing shouldn't be built anywhere.
most americans say not in my backyard to more housing in their backyard too, but i digress.
I don't want a data center in my back yard because I do want housing in my back yard.
Once a data center shows up, that plot of land is locked out of more productive development for decades.
The article puts that percentage at 39%, which falls a bit short of “most” but is frighteningly high.
What kind of reason would you possibly have to write the sentence you did?
Why did you?
It could be argued that the article tendentiously paints this as a "not in my backyard" issue in order to normalize NIMBY outlook, conflating building AI data centres with building housing.
The whole world is California, and the most important thing we can do is pack more and more people into the same space. People from here, people from there. We want more crowdedness, and everyhing that comes with it: crime, noise, pollution, lack of social cohesion. Everything. Every place must be like this, and everything must grow forever.
Negatives acknowledged, there are huge efficiency upsides to dense human living. Everything becomes smoother, faster, less wasteful. You get a society that leverages economies of scale for everything.
In some areas, density is appropriate, and in some areas it's not. I wish we could talk about housing density and "build more housing" as if there was not one universal solution that worked everywhere and for everyone. Dense urban living is not appropriate in a rural or suburban town. Single family homes are not appropriate in a high-demand urban area. Different people want different things, too. No matter how efficient and good for the environment it is, I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.
> I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.
Yes, this is the crux. Loud, smelly, concrete cities suck. And you’re right that density alone would lead to this.
What we’d ideally want is cities that can be dense without being loud, smelly, and dangerous. These cities exist: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Zurich, Utrecht, Freiburg, etc.
We can’t do this in the US because we can’t remove the source of the noise/danger/stink/concrete problem: cars.
And that’s the catch 22: In the US everyone gets around by car, so density becomes undesirable. We can’t densify because density + cars is bad, and we can’t reduce cars because it’s not dense enough for public transit to get better.
Individuals get stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma where driving is safer, more comfortable, and faster than transit. So every individual with the means to drive chooses to drive. Public transit becomes branded as something for poor people. The concrete honeycomb fills up. The downtown becomes a noisy disaster. People can no longer imagine that good cities are possible.
Can you really think of no other problems in addition to cars?
I live in a city and the problems are:
1) sometimes it is noisy at night, usually because of people in cars, but sometimes because of people not in cars;
2) sometimes it takes longer than needed to walk somewhere, due to intersections
3) my house is not as big as I would like. (I think this applies to many people regardless of how big their house is.)
4) the busses are always late in winter
I know I kicked off this discussion, but I have also bemoaned many times about the anti-car people being quasi religious in their anti-worship of cars. They talk about it like missionaries talk about jesus.
Well that's no different than vegans. We "need them" to preach obnoxiously because cars are presumed indispensable.
Vegans gave us the Impossible Burger, which I'll eat instead of regular burgers when available. What might anti-car people trigger as a positive?
The only difference between a rural or suburban town and the sprawl of a city is time, really. Lots of modern urban areas used to be suburban or essentially rural.
Anyway if you densify cities you can slow down the sprawl and maybe keep suburbs actually smaller? a few more ten story apartment blocks downtown might house the people who have to live in your area and commute.
This is a theoretical ideal, where we ignore people's desire to own large tracts of land and live in quiet places. A mega-city where all the humans human, and then massive tracts of untouched wilderness shy of any industry that has to be there.
This is also why communist countries had stuff like dense housing in deeply rural areas, and why most people were shuffled into cities. Big houses and properties do nothing for the state and just encumber society. Way easier if everyone just lives in their tightly packed central shoe box.
We could also fit more people in if you crushed everyone, dehydrated them and stored they remains in huge compressed cubes. Efficiency is not all we want
TBF, Americans say "NIMBY" to everything
It's a long-standing tradition. Our forefathers famously said "NIMBY" to taxation without representation.
I guess we'll just have to put them in space then
The datacenter outrage is mislabeled. It's actually zoning outrage, caused by local governments that aren't taking their citizen's concerns seriously. It just so happens that datacenters are the hottest (no pun intended) industrial construction option right now.
There's more to it than that. They're not just obnoxious to exist in the vicinity of, they also drive up local energy prices.
Also: Most Americans wouldn't know if an AI datacenter was already in their backyard
ChatGPT estimates for $300,000 I can build a 10x12 datacenter in my backyard with an operating breakeven at 29% utilization and 489 year capital payback. No thanks, not in my back yard.
America is so massive, these trillion dollar companies can surely build these out in the boonies with very few people around?
ETA: I would rather no data centers be built, but my point is if we have to, let’s minimize the number of people who are affected. Offer to move them if need be.
It's generally more expensive for them when it comes to things like power, water and internet.
Boonies have very poor in each of those and building it up would take too long so throw another in Northern Virginia since they have expensive access to additional of that but at least it will become operational.
And ruin the boonies too? American norms and laws are not conducive to making nice places to live, but they've skated by having enough land and car-first infrastructure. With the huge increase in warehouses and data centers in residential areas over the past 5-10 years, I wonder if there will be an inflection point where it finally needs to be dealt with.
Even then they can wind up in the proverbial backyard. I don't know much about data center staffing needs and zoning laws but those would seem relevant spatial constraints and considerations.
I wonder the same thing. It could be that getting transition grid interconnects and redundant fiber paths is much faster in more suburban areas vs rural areas.
A lot of the big companies are massively allergic to building infrastructure, even when they get government grants to do it. Look at how badly the broadband rollout was bungled. Shot their own foot at this point.
When I was at Google they arranged to have this stuff built out. But it took a few years each time.
I agree with you, but even then it's still going to be someone's backyard
We could in a vacuum, but they require human labor and human labor isn't found in the boonies.
It's the age old problem. The people in the cities cry that there are no jobs and the rural businesses cry that they can't find anyone to hire, with no great resolution as the businesses cannot afford to move into the city and the people don't want to travel to the boonies.
However, in this case, these data centers are so well capitalized that they can afford to move them into the cities right beside where the workers are located.
I propose we build one under Sam Altman's house.
They need to hire IT, maintainence, and security to run the datacenters, and there aren't many qualified people in the boonies. Small towns are better targets, and honestly also just objectively less damaging to the environment.
None of this NIMBYism is about the datacenter itself, it's all a protest against AI making the economy really shitty for them.
Sounds like they should build the equivalent of a little mining town out in the boonies too and start working on the housing crisis simultaneously. “Move to Nowhere, USA, and get cheap, new housing and a good-paying job” would get them the talent they want.
EDIT: yes, I know mining towns had their own share of problems (I’ve heard “16 tons” too), but knowing the hazards of the past, I think we can figure out a more equitable structure with this kind of setup.
Mining towns used to work in the days when one parent worked full-time and one parent raised kids full-time, and job security, unions, and pensions were a thing.
In modern times, both parents often have career ambitions, and the modern capitalist economy and housing pricing has greedily recalibrated to every family needing two incomes. So you're not going to have many families willing to move to the boonies unless you (at the bare minimum) hand out doubly-high salaries.
Very likely that's not enough though, as it's also a massive financial risk to them if you can just lay them off after the next earnings report with no pension to continue supporting them. Most modern families would rather stay where jobs are slightly more likely to exist.
> “Move to Nowhere, USA, and get cheap, new housing and a good-paying job”
These types of opportunities already exist but are rarely taken up upon. More of them means more jobs unfilled.
When those mining towns were the way of the world people moved around a lot more. It was no big deal to pack your bags and move there. While census data only started being collected from the 1950s onward, it is estimated that ~40% of the population would move in a given year at the hight of the mining booms. Even in the 1950s, when we started collecting concrete data, around 30% of the population would move in a given year. Now only around 8% of the population will move in a given year.
Nowadays there is an expectation that you can stay put. For example, if you watch housing affordability discussions closely you'll notice the theme is always "I cannot afford a house where I am currently located", not "I cannot afford a house anywhere in the world". Attitudes about living arrangements have changed as compared to the past and the AI companies are not about to change it back any time soon. They have to work with people they want to hire, and that means putting the work where the people are already found.
You need on the order of 15 permanent onsite employees to run a datacenter; 5 each for 24/7 coverage of security, building maintenance, and tech. You probably don't really need 24/7 onsite for building maintenance or tech. Traveling employees or (probably traveling) contractors can handle projects that exceed the local scope.
Should be able to locally source security and building maintenance, if the pay is good. These are skills that are needed everywhere. The onsite tech can likely be sourced locally too: first and foremost, they're remote hands ... knowledgeable remote hands are nicer, but the mandatory skills are: read and follow directions, notice and report unusual circumstances, lift and manipulate heavy objects. It's not rocket surgery.
If you put your datacenter in the near boonies, say 30 minutes away from the nearest suburb, you can usually still find the big lots you need, and people can commute from there: a 30 minute commute with no traffic isn't too awful. Of course, you'll have neighbors on large lots who didn't think through that living out on the boonies with no zoning meant noisy neighbors could move in. :P
I don't consider 30 minutes away from town the "boonies", that's more like a normal commute. The boonies would be like a 3 hour drive in the Sonora desert.
Well, "boonies" is pretty ill defined, but my criteria is most homes are are 10+ acre lots, and large lots are widely available.
You want your datacenter to be in reach of interstate highways (rail might be nice, too), two electrical substations [1], and close to fiber that's already run. That restricts your available boonies, but there's still lots outside of the east coast.
[1] yes, you'll have onsite generation, and yes, you might plan to run from onsite generation most of the time, but you still want to have the option for utility power, and it's nice to have two substations to get more uptime, subject to more transfer switch complexity.
While most people wouldn't hesitate to travel 30 minutes out of town, the generally don't ever think to see if jobs exist 30 minutes out of town, and thus won't find the work there. When looking for work they search within the city they live in, not the next town over with a name they might not even know. This is a real problem for a lot of businesses that exist 30 minutes out of town.
In fairness, the companies behind these data centres are well known and have endless marketing budgets, so they can likely find a way to close that gap where the typical rural-based business cannot, but at the same time why take the risk when you can just as easily build the datacenter right beside the person you want to hire?
> so they can likely find a way to close that gap
I mean, typically you just list your job in the nearby major city, even when the site address isn't there. Same thing that you do when listing your hotel or your car for sale.
30 minutes out of town isn't nearby anymore. The highways are surprisingly efficient. And consider that it is more like a 1-1.5 hour drive for someone living on the opposing end of the city — possibly more if it is a large city. Advertising a job 1.5 hours away as if it is local doesn't tend to win you any admiration from job seekers. Maybe AI companies are prominent enough that they can piss off workers and still hire them in the end, but that doesn't fly for most businesses.
But, again, why take the risk when you can just as easily put the work right beside the workers?
They have to put up with noise in their homes, that's very bad.
As Covered in the Hit TV Series Pied Piper, Season 1 (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNi0p7YtmyY
but what thing would most Americans say "yes! build this in my backyard"?>
A park, a public recreation centre, an elementary school, a cute coffee shop…
You know, human stuff.
All these things have been vehemently opposed by NIMBYs:
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapleRidge/comments/1ewgim0/maple_r...
2. https://nationalpost.com/life/the-important-questions-is-it-...
3. https://jeremyl.substack.com/p/nimbytales-stop-the-sound-of-...
4. https://torontolife.com/city/this-corner-store-owner-spent-y...
I don’t think any of these examples represent _successful_ opposition, though. Except maybe the warming center for homeless people? I can’t tell if it got built or not.
These examples basically amount to “some people didn’t like this”, which doesn’t mean that the balance of public opinion wasn’t favourable. Unanimous support is too high a bar.
Simple, make it legally required that all new datacenters being built by <LLM_COMPANY> is built in the literal backyard of the primary residence of the children of the Csuites of said <LLM_COMPANY>.
Everyone should be in support of this idea.
Everyone else gets to be free from datacenter pollution, and the Csuites get their datacenters.
Win win.
I find what people want from the data center build-out is pretty reasonable:
1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house. 2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid. 3. Don't burn the earth with CO2. 4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance. 5. Pay a lot of taxes.
But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.
What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters
1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles. 2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent. 3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good. 4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty. 5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.
Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.
I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.
It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.
Just require them to also pay for a new local power plant with the capacity to cover them before they get building permits, honestly. Maybe say they can't qualify for tax breaks too?
That would slow the expansion, its cheaper and easier and faster to just steal power from the local communities and then gaslight them.
Absolutely this. If you think about different types of objections to nearby data centers and do some pretty minimal research, you come up with a reasonable set of solutions that most people would agree on.
That's not what people are doing though. People are genuinely afraid for the future, and much of the data center backlash is driven by emotion. You can see this reflected in populist political movements. People have a (well-founded) sense that those in power don't have their interests in mind and they're lashing out without much thought.
dual use them into super low latency esports stadiums and let's see how principled people really are
And the owner class has already trotted out the old Red Scare “If you don’t like datacenters, you’re just doing what China wants” bullshit has a defense.
Musk has is it right. Terafab and orbital data center pods.
I would flip my bitch switch if a datacenter was stood up near me, where I could hear it. I am on 5 acres in rural Michigan surrounded by peace and quiet. I specifically came here for this reason. At the same time, I understand that we need datacenters. And tbh, Michigan is under-served in this space (ex, most of my queries thru the Cloudflare network have to go to Chicago first), and I wish we had more. But not close to residential areas. Not on top of valuable farmland.
My wacky idea was that datacenters should be built on EPA superfund sites. It becomes a win-win. Datacenter gets land that humans cannot occupy, helps/funds partial cleanup, slaps a big ass concrete building down on top of the rest of the mess and kills two birds with one stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
>Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
It's cheaper this way.
Oh yeah right, underground data centers. What are you going to say next, data centers in space? Be real.
Geothermal heating/cooling exists because deep down in the soil temperatures are fairly constant. And the earth is a fantastic insulator both in temperature and sound. Aside from the cost of digging a giant hole, there really is no reason not to be doing this.
Another issue is that they bring very low to no jobs to locals besides some initial construction work.
.. and are completely ignored. The mighty nimby seems to be very nimble as soon as economic interests are involved. Very strange.. i thought he was the mighty preventer of all things changing. Especially the plotholes.. eh potholes and buses and rail..
The other day I was talking with two friends—one programmer, one musician, both of fairly conservative political persuasion—and the topic of “AI data centers” came up. I said something to the effect of, “y'know, all that talk about how they just use all up all the water from wherever they're built is total propaganda nonsense, right?” and both were genuinely taken aback by this statement. As far as they were concerned, “AI data centers” were something a Captain Planet villain would build, just absolute ecological disasters, inherently. I'm relatively neutral when it comes to this stuff but man, the propaganda against “AI data centers” really works!
Your two friends are factually correct. You somehow misinterpret how much water they consume.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
The energy grid use seems far more worrisome than water use. Why would anyone build an AI data center in a specifically “water-stressed region”?
A: Because they can get away with it.
I love the idea of a Captain Planet villain having some underling crunch the numbers to choose the optimal place to build dozens of AI data centers such that there's just enough water available for them to use, but then by using said water, it conveniently destroys any and all local ecologies and human communities in the process, cackling all the while—it's so completely divorced from reality that it makes perfect sense that average people living in the mediabrained modern hellscape of today would believe that to be the case.
I don't know what agenda you're going with, but it isn't reality. They're destroying water tables. I'll leave this link here for you to read if you're brave enough to step outside your Captain Planet cartoon narrative and have an actual look at the water consumption problem.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
Or if you prefer; a much deeper non-vibecoded, scientific source with lots of citations: https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Centers-Impact-Global-Resource...
Why am I supposed to take a janky-ass web visualization, completely devoid of citations as far as I can tell, and which was, itself, almost certainly vibecoded, at face value, as a valid argument?
I love how you went from posting links to articles to make arguments for you, to then editing your comment to link to a $250 book that I should buy and read, so it can make your argument for you.
I'm starting to think you don't actually love the things you claim to love? But yes, several communities are having trouble with these things. Here's one: https://lakelandgazette.info/news/2026/07/05/meta-data-cente... and here's another: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/03/amazon-wil...
Refusing to acknowledge sources is pathetic. The information directly refutes your cartoonish take on the problem if you're brave enough to pull yourself into reality.
Trust the Experts who have done Studies and written Papers in Committees their objective view of reality not to mention their morality is superior to yours yadda yadda heard it all before
How could you have heard it all before if you've never bothered to look at the information?
You don't need to put in a lot of effort to convince people that creepy, deceitful, generally unlikable, rich folks are doing things you won't like and are lying to get away with it.
Not on my planet, burn them all down!
Ok, then how about above? Elon and friends want to launch them all into orbit.
It seems downright dishonest to focus so much on Loudon County VA, which is DC's major tech hub and has the highest median income of any county in the US. It is definitely dishonest to not mention any demographic or historical details.
Unbelievable. What's next, NIMBYs for sewage and effluent? Where does it end exactly?
You definitely do not want a sewage treatment plant in your backyard. But hey, you got a cheaper home price so that the rich guys can pump their crap to your backyard from miles away.
IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards. Maybe those standards should rise to include ambient noise requirements, heat dissipation, capital contributions to water/electricity supply, additional tax burden points (for land use without, maybe?).
But I also feel there needs to be an assertion that if you own the land it's your property and you're free to do most things with it, safely and politely. This is about property rights and freedoms.
This is about property rights and freedoms.
Your property rights stop where my ears are. Or I have the freedom to not listen to your gas turbine. Or however one wishes to flip that on its head. Whether you own the property or not, that property isn’t in a vacuum.
Your property rights end when corporations, who get sick of your obstinance, simply place some strategic election donations and soon enough you’re up against eminent domain.
I agree that Citizens United needs to go, let's prioritize our efforts to solve root issues instead of tire ourselves trimming weeds that pop up.
That is all covered by my point about regulations rising to the task. Did you read the whole comment?
The point is you should be allowed to have a gas turbine (or whatever generator meets the requirements), if it meets emissions, noise, and heat regulations.
Yeah, I read your comment.
IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as…
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hops. But there are examples of data centers being approved with minimal public comment, if any. Musk’s data center in Memphis is frequently trotted out, and for good reason. When the “as long as” part takes place, we can discuss the legality of NIMBY.
> IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards.
NIMB is part of setting those standards.
In a nearby town, the city was planning on putting a moratorium on new data centers, and so a lot of companies rushed their application in before the moratorium start date. They all got approved. The local citizens got really mad that they were approved, and the city simply said "Look: We legally cannot deny them permits if they're conforming to current requirements."
So yes, you're right. And yes, your statement is mostly irrelevant. NIMBYism is always about the future requirements. It's not as if enacting a rule disallowing high density residences will force existing ones to be torn down.
Rather than making everyone comply with the strictest noise and other restrictions of residential areas, it's much easier for everyone if you put industrial things in an industrial area and residences in a residential area.
Good luck upgrading your home’s electrical service to charge an EV, only to be told it’s impossible because the nearby data center has already consumed all the available grid capacity.
Happened to family of mine. Not in the US though. They charge their EV with a 3kW charger now.
That is an invested capital issue. If it's not worth building a plant, they wont. The supply will fall until the prices rise enough to incentivize new plants. If the elec prices rise enough the datacenters will find alternate solutions .
It seems like people are some how railing against basic economics?
Like if we dont like it we have a marketplace of alternatives, the opportunity to invest in new supply, and the choice to not consume said energy if the price is too high...