Obviously, it's fine to be wary of any development in your area. But it seems like there is a certain amount of irrational(?) fear of datacenters. And I really don't understand it.
I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe there is a political component to it. But I do worry there is some kind of manipulation being done.
I think it's as simple as people generally believe that electricity is good for the world, and AI is bad for it. In the former case you're kindof taking-one-for-the-team. Even places that have nasty nasty stuff like tailings ponds generally have a kind of civic pride that coal mining or whatever was a necessity and the sacrifice of their local environment made a lot of other people's comfy lives possible. Data-centers are just not going to inspire that sentiment lol.
For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.
Thanks to information campaigns people who live near nuclear facilities tend to have an above average, positive, view of the safety and threat.
A large part of my extended family lives near a large facility. Wind turbines launching ice at the nearby roads is a larger (yet trivial), safety concern.
I don’t know the background to this project, but a nuclear project would likely be very transparent - with public studies on the impacts and meetings for the public to make their views known. It’s far quicker to build a datacenter than to increase local grid and water capacity later.
> The Stratos Project moved forward with far too many unanswered questions around water, power, cost, and transparency.
Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.
In a town near me a paper plant recently closed (to much anger), then people protested the potential use of the land for a data center, citing concerns about noise, water use, power use, and traffic.
I have childhood memories of visiting my grandparents, who lived near a town with a paper mill. Going to town, going to a restaurant etc, meant being inundated with the horrible smell produced by that mill, within a radius of miles. It was a fact of life there. Genuinely hard to imagine a data center producing worse waste products than that.
It’s pretty simple. People think that AI will take their jobs and maybe murder them, probably because the people developing AI have said it’s going to take their jobs and maybe murder them.
Opposing data centers is the biggest lever most people have to impede AI development.
Aside from "moral outrage" style concerns ("AI is bad for the environment", power consumption, water consumption, or "datacenters benefit rich people, rich people bad, so datacenters bad"), I've heard of specific bad examples how datacenters (allegedly) negatively impacted the surrounding population:
- Noise (from fans to generators to possible infrasound concerns)
- Air pollution (from data centers semi-permanently running on generators)
- Electricity prices (although I don't understand how this is supposed to work)
- Water consumption affecting the population (water restrictions, price increases, water table dropping)
Many of these are one-sided stories told from the perspective of the residents that I didn't try to verify, but I suspect some of these concerns are legit.
The company building the datacenter has a lot of incentives to cut corners and/or cause some of these impacts, externalizing its costs (e.g. by saving money at the expense of noise emissions, running the DC on unpermitted gas turbines to be able to build a DC where there isn't enough grid, negotiating clever deals that benefit the company but screw over the utility forcing it to raise prices for others, using groundwater for evaporative cooling to make cooling cheaper, etc.)
The company building the datacenter also likely has a lot more experience while the people of the town and the town itself are doing this once, so there is an inbalance in experience that makes it easy for the company to get away with some of these.
There is very little benefit that the people of the area can expect from a data center - as I understand it, there are very few jobs in one past the construction phase, even the construction jobs are often filled with experienced travelling workers, and given the negotiation imbalance, a town seems likely to get screwed on any contributions that the data center promises.
Maybe the solution would be some kind of framework/organization that guarantees (ideally with binding, well tested contracts) that the datacenter won't be a nuisance, builds a reputation for being reliable, and in exchange, companies that work under that framework can expect quick approvals and less pushback.
Until that exists, or companies start offering guarantees up front (e.g. guaranteeing a certain power price or noise level), I'm not surprised that people push back (especially if the company building the data center has screwed up in the past).
> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers:
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
The resource consumption is huge and it provides relatively little to the surrounding community compared to its intake. For most residents who live near one it’s a net loss. Qualify of life decreases and utility bills go up so that a Silicon Valley exec can get a nice bonus for closing the deal.
A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.
They're big, use up a lot of power, destroy a large batch of land, produce noise and locals get basically nothing out of that (it's not like they provide a lot of jobs or anything). The power bills also go up.
> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
Yay people have finally become rational about nuclear power safety !!!
Utah is such a special, creepy little standout enclave among the states. I've worked with a few Mormon coworkers who are genuinely wonderful people whom I adore, but they are, as a group, militant in a way that's hard to describe.
You should at least try to describe it more specifically if you're casting shade on a huge population. Otherwise you just look like a bigot assigning traits to tens of millions of people based on a few people with the same religion that you know. I grew up Mormon and I've also lived and worked among mostly non Mormon populations, and I would say most Mormons are actually not militant.
Turns out Mormons are just people too with a huge diversity of personality.
Obviously, it's fine to be wary of any development in your area. But it seems like there is a certain amount of irrational(?) fear of datacenters. And I really don't understand it.
I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe there is a political component to it. But I do worry there is some kind of manipulation being done.
I think it's as simple as people generally believe that electricity is good for the world, and AI is bad for it. In the former case you're kindof taking-one-for-the-team. Even places that have nasty nasty stuff like tailings ponds generally have a kind of civic pride that coal mining or whatever was a necessity and the sacrifice of their local environment made a lot of other people's comfy lives possible. Data-centers are just not going to inspire that sentiment lol.
For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.
Watch these
https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?si=4XpIb0vb8YjY1g_k
https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=EB8zAF0JYHvOB23a
https://youtu.be/3VJT2JeDCyw?si=ak7haiWzbX9O8BL9
Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those.
Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.
Have you read the responses to (at least) the first of these videos? https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Also, I thought the response by Benn Jordan on Bluesky was informative. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
> That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
Wouldn't the question be more simply, Do you want your power bills to go up for the same power used?
And the nuclear accidents that have happend have mostly been overblown (apart from Chernobyl).
Thanks to information campaigns people who live near nuclear facilities tend to have an above average, positive, view of the safety and threat.
A large part of my extended family lives near a large facility. Wind turbines launching ice at the nearby roads is a larger (yet trivial), safety concern.
I don’t know the background to this project, but a nuclear project would likely be very transparent - with public studies on the impacts and meetings for the public to make their views known. It’s far quicker to build a datacenter than to increase local grid and water capacity later.
> The Stratos Project moved forward with far too many unanswered questions around water, power, cost, and transparency.
Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.
That alone is enough of an argument against them.
Why did you not include the tax they bring in? I think this is a serious omission and points at motivated reasoning.
Can you do one where you account for the tax dollars and compare it to similar industries?
In a town near me a paper plant recently closed (to much anger), then people protested the potential use of the land for a data center, citing concerns about noise, water use, power use, and traffic.
I have childhood memories of visiting my grandparents, who lived near a town with a paper mill. Going to town, going to a restaurant etc, meant being inundated with the horrible smell produced by that mill, within a radius of miles. It was a fact of life there. Genuinely hard to imagine a data center producing worse waste products than that.
It’s pretty simple. People think that AI will take their jobs and maybe murder them, probably because the people developing AI have said it’s going to take their jobs and maybe murder them.
Opposing data centers is the biggest lever most people have to impede AI development.
Aside from "moral outrage" style concerns ("AI is bad for the environment", power consumption, water consumption, or "datacenters benefit rich people, rich people bad, so datacenters bad"), I've heard of specific bad examples how datacenters (allegedly) negatively impacted the surrounding population:
- Noise (from fans to generators to possible infrasound concerns)
- Air pollution (from data centers semi-permanently running on generators)
- Electricity prices (although I don't understand how this is supposed to work)
- Water consumption affecting the population (water restrictions, price increases, water table dropping)
Many of these are one-sided stories told from the perspective of the residents that I didn't try to verify, but I suspect some of these concerns are legit.
The company building the datacenter has a lot of incentives to cut corners and/or cause some of these impacts, externalizing its costs (e.g. by saving money at the expense of noise emissions, running the DC on unpermitted gas turbines to be able to build a DC where there isn't enough grid, negotiating clever deals that benefit the company but screw over the utility forcing it to raise prices for others, using groundwater for evaporative cooling to make cooling cheaper, etc.)
The company building the datacenter also likely has a lot more experience while the people of the town and the town itself are doing this once, so there is an inbalance in experience that makes it easy for the company to get away with some of these.
There is very little benefit that the people of the area can expect from a data center - as I understand it, there are very few jobs in one past the construction phase, even the construction jobs are often filled with experienced travelling workers, and given the negotiation imbalance, a town seems likely to get screwed on any contributions that the data center promises.
Maybe the solution would be some kind of framework/organization that guarantees (ideally with binding, well tested contracts) that the datacenter won't be a nuisance, builds a reputation for being reliable, and in exchange, companies that work under that framework can expect quick approvals and less pushback.
Until that exists, or companies start offering guarantees up front (e.g. guaranteeing a certain power price or noise level), I'm not surprised that people push back (especially if the company building the data center has screwed up in the past).
> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
Data centers come with gas-fired plants that pollute the air and reduce your life span. It’s quite rational to not want to live next to one of these: https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-...
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers:
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
Could you share more about the rate increases? The newspaper articles I've seen seemed sketchy on how people were affected.
The resource consumption is huge and it provides relatively little to the surrounding community compared to its intake. For most residents who live near one it’s a net loss. Qualify of life decreases and utility bills go up so that a Silicon Valley exec can get a nice bonus for closing the deal.
A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.
They're big, use up a lot of power, destroy a large batch of land, produce noise and locals get basically nothing out of that (it's not like they provide a lot of jobs or anything). The power bills also go up.
> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
Yay people have finally become rational about nuclear power safety !!!
...right, right?
You’re saying it as if living near a nuclear power plant is bad or something
It's funny to see the fast switch from "NIMBYs are killing affordable housing and progress" to no datacenters in my back yard.
I wonder what the difference is between some apartment buildings and a 360-acre data center campus
If you're looking for actionable information, and don't want to sign up anywhere to see it:
https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...
This has to be the next 5g causes autism issue.
A referendum for what?
If you don't want that land being used for anything, just buy it yourself.
Utah hasn’t voted for a Democrat president since Johnson. Reap what you sow.
Indeed, there are no data centers in Democrat run states so it's definitely that
(/s in case it's not obvious)
Utah is such a special, creepy little standout enclave among the states. I've worked with a few Mormon coworkers who are genuinely wonderful people whom I adore, but they are, as a group, militant in a way that's hard to describe.
You should at least try to describe it more specifically if you're casting shade on a huge population. Otherwise you just look like a bigot assigning traits to tens of millions of people based on a few people with the same religion that you know. I grew up Mormon and I've also lived and worked among mostly non Mormon populations, and I would say most Mormons are actually not militant.
Turns out Mormons are just people too with a huge diversity of personality.