I can actually speak to this as someone in ruralish Pennsylvania whose town is going through one of these backlashes pretty heavily.
The major issue, at least in my neighborhood, is location more than anything else. We have a lot of industrially zoned areas that are great for data center location, and where they could be surrounded by other established industrial builds (think soda bottling plants, warehouses, transportation depos, semiconductor fabs, etc.) All the infrastructure is built out, electricity needs, etc. There is also a ton of land that exists that could be used for this purpose pretty distantly from town centers, if you can convince the gov/owners to part with it.
But despite this, the folks who want to expand data centers are instead trying to push instead into residential areas, or otherwise on land that would basically butt you up against pre-existing neighborhoods. Where I lack insight is if it's a matter of industrial property being too expensive compared to the swathes of otherwise unused land (at least that isn't used for state forests or whatnot,) or if there just literally is no room available for what they want to build out. But all the aspects of having bought your land to be in a residential area suddenly become way busy, value might go down because it's now in this weird quasi-industrial zone.
While there are legitimate concerns about the electricity/water usage, I (tinfoil hat) think that this is more of a game of influence/propaganda/state-level interest in an subject where it's easy to sow seeds of dissent. I personally think the electricity/water thing is a concern on a bigger scale than just individual utility bills, but it's blown out of proportion under that guise by conveniently cherry picking data from extreme examples. I also (more tinfoil) think that there's a lot of money changing hands since the AI boom is still growing and people are desperate to try to make a buck asap in any way possible, regardless of what may come tomorrow, so they're more willing to make a profit off of everything, but I have no legitimate proof of this.
Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.
I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years (26% annual growth rate)
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years (73% annual growth rate)
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The 2015 - 2024 growth curve would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth (which is obviously accelerating), especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
You misunderstood I think. They aren't arguing water is a bigger problem than energy. They are arguing that negative perception is mostly focused around water use.
They do use water, and the numbers look very large which makes for big scary headlines. However people who actually know how water is used in a city are used to numbers much larger than that.
it's the demand delta, not the total demand, that's concerning. Also not all use cases are created equal: using water to keep people alive is legitimate and using water to build a machine that can automatically almost count the number of vowels in a sentence is not legitimate, especially when that usage drives up demand and makes it harder to use water to keep people alive.
Well "you" don't "get to", but this is precisely why we made the concept "states" and use "state power" to counteract other natural modalities of power.
Which is being demonstrated by the use of state power to kill data center development.
Yeah, it’s one thing when SV runs the Uber script (ignoring the law to build big enough to buy politicians) to hurt cab drivers. It’s very different when it’s your neighborhood.
The difference is they already exist while the datacenters don't. And its a lot easier, in a democracy, to stop a thing from being built in the first place than to tear it down after the fact, what with pesky laws about private property and so forth.
Or are you really saying that if we can't solve all water usage problems then we shouldn't solve or prevent any? Is that what you're suggesting?
I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event. And there is definitely no explosion of new golf courses. Total DC power consumption growth is practically exponential for the last 5 years.
>I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event
That's just status quo bias, given that they're an ongoing source of water consumption. "oh it doesn't matter that [thing] is guzzling water, because it's already there!".
Exactly right. It's a lot easier to prevent an asshat venture than it is to dismantle it. Now that the public is aware, I wouldn't be surprised if new golf courses start getting the same treatment.
They haven’t been. I’m aware of new golf courses being planned in my area and I hear nothing but enthusiasm. Literally no one brings up water consumption as a concern.
This whole thing is a sublimation of vaguer anxieties about AI (which are perfectly rational!) into areas where people feel like they can make more concrete objections that are likelier to succeed. The water thing is completely fake, whether people think so or not.
Not entirely. Lack of regulations mean recycled water facilities can end up being consumption facilities with pollution risk. Also Meta plans to restore as much water as they use by 2030. Which, seems like a while to break even. That's primarily because ai data centers require a lot more cooling water and power than traditional ones. So, you can scream fake news all you want, but it is a concern and it is a good way to oppose ai in general. And power consumption, noise pollution, and pollution are also serious issues. "Whatabout this worse thing" is a pretty terrible argument. You can whatabout anything, but it doesn't make that thing any less bad. aka two wrongs don't make a right.
It’s not just whataboutism, it’s pointing out that the people up in arms about data center water usage don’t even know about the long list of things that use way more water than data centers, and when told, they don’t care.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to conclude that their beef is not really with water usage as much as a general hatred of AI, big tech, etc, and water usage is an easy thing to focus on.
golf courses don't contaminate the water supply. Amazon was just forced to settled a lawsuit for 20 million because they took a community's water supply and made it undrinkable. Now they'll be paying to improve public water treatment infrastructure and dig deeper wells looking for cleaner water. When's the last time a golf course had to do that?
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, most of the new facilities (e.g. Stargate) are running closed loop systems. PUE goes up a bit if you have to use chillers, but ultimately it's faster/easier to build a large facility in a closed loop fashion than get water (permitting, treatment, etc.). NVIDIA pushing 45C inlet temps is to allow facilities to run dry coolers instead of chillers and make this even easier! Two phase cooling (required above ~3kW TDP) would eliminate water use in the secondary loop (if not the primary, eventually).
Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology so who is dropping the ball?
Yeah, all these stupid little municipalities have to do is shit they've literally never had to do before while getting sued out of their socks by literal trillion dollar companies.
That's all it takes for them to do their part in generating gargantuan amounts of value for people who live 1,000 miles away and their uberwealthy hardly-human CEOs and investors.
In the case of one amazon data center the town already had nitrates in their water due to agricultural runoff, but at levels that weren't a problem. Amazon took in hundreds of millions of gallons of that water for cooling, which evaporated away some of the water, but left the nitrates. Then amazon dumped the concentrated nitrate 'waste water' at such high volumes that it was pushed so deep into ground that it reached the aquifer contaminating the source for some 45k people. Soon people's taps were delivering water contaminated at 10x the legal limit. People got sick. A bunch of parents lost their babies.
Amazon was forced to settle for 20 million which will pay for digging to find uncontaminated water sources deeper in the ground. They'll also pay for water treatments to help remove the excess nitrates.
Data centers don't have to bring in new toxins and pollutants. They can also make existing problems much much worse.
This doesn't even make any sense. "deeper in the ground" is mostly wishful thinking. Why wouldn't the contamination spread? How can anyone be sure there is even potable water deeper?
With regular rainfall/usage the nitrates don't get far enough down to reach the aquifer. The nitrates get filtered naturally and remain in upper layers of the soil. Amazon concentrated the contamination and drove it far enough down that it reached and contaminated the aquifer, but below that the father down you dig and pull up water the less contaminated it will be. Part of the settlement is a fund for digging new private wells deep enough that the water contamination is under legal limits. I guess if there's no clean water below the contamination they'll have to stop using wells entirely and depend on treated water from the contaminated source.
The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:
1. Replacing forests and fields with concrete buildings prevents rainwater from filtering into the soil, which stops local aquifers from recharging.
2. During storms the rain runs off impervious surfaces and can cause downstream flooding.
3. Heavy land grading washes loose sediment into nearby waterways, destroying aquatic habitats and turning private drinking wells muddy. (That especially gets local homeowners angry and gets lots of video views).
And then you have the ongoing operation of open cooling systems:
4. Evaporative cooling systems discharge concentrated mineral brine that spikes the salinity of freshwater ecosystems.
5. Cooling water is treated with toxic biocides and anti-scalants that can contaminate local water basins. It can also contain leached copper, zinc, and PFAS.
6. Discharging warm wastewater depletes oxygen in streams and alters the overall ecology.
Of course all of these issues could be mitigated to a reasonable degree with proper care and effort:
>this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly
Do you want to bet your whole town on things being done properly right now?
All of this applies to all construction of all types. There are already plenty of environmental regulations around buildings and their construction. Maybe these aren't being enforced, maybe the laws need to be stricter. I'm not an expert but it sounds plausible. But if that's the case, we have to fix those problems otherwise you're just playing whack-a-mole with development. When you specifically focus on datacenters and stopping datacenters it gives away that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for your actual goals.
The first three apply to any construction project with a paved surface and there are ways to mitigate that, you can collect the runoff in a cistern/tank that filters back into the groundwater or collect it in a retention pond which does the same thing.
Items 4 and 5 apply to any facility with cooling towers, not limited to but including hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, prisons, cold storage warehouses, combined cycle power plants, large commercial buildings, paper plants, retirement homes, commercial bakeries, industrial facilities with heat rejection needs, etc.
The sixth one applies to virtually every power plant in existence.
how would this mess with a water supply though, or are we talking the private wells? with a private well though it's something you want to mitigate either way, filters, etc, granted I have only seen the handful of clips where someone is showing dirty water coming out of the tap and I am trying to trace the chain of responsibility for the water supply, thanks for the detailed response btw
My county, for example, only processes surface water. If someone altered our upstream collection or polluted the reservoir, it would be a very big deal.
For private wells: if you're a rural person who previously had perfectly fine water, and now someone comes along to mess with that, even if it "just" requires installing expensive new equipment, you're going to be pissed.
Well I don't have the data in front of me, but building power capacity leads to higher capacity payments, which are passed to all consumers. This has been an global industry standard for decades at far as I know.
The study's authors acknowledge it in the text.
> We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach.
There is a methodical issue with that study that the authors acknowledge.
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
People should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.
There's a global market for energy. What you see at the pump translates into electricity prices in a slow and grinding process. Remember that most of our electricity is not generated from renewable sources! Three years ago Russia invaded Ukraine, that pushed up fuel prices and electricity prices have followed. Now, we have the Iran war and that will push up electricity prices even more. The issue here is that you do not understand these markets.
> In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears,
where I am the water is a part of it, but a big issue is electricity prices going up (which they will)
Also Sam, Dario et al have constantly (like literally, every single week at least) been telling us that AI is going to make all of us unemployable and have to live on welfare.
Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?
The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
But the question shouldn't be, do you want datacentres or not? Datacentres are gonna be built in China or elsewhere.
The question should be, do you prefer to have them also built in the US or do you agree to have China (or another country) controlling AI in the future?
If AI is really gonna make everyone unemployable, then it seems to me like you would want them to be built in your country, not in another country, especially not one you disagree with.
Of course they're still the question of where exactly there are built and how to compensate for the nuisances they may bring.
> The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
I doubt that it's ignorance on their part. I think their target audience with those comments is the US government, basically setting up OpenAI/Anthropic as "too big to fail" in the sense that "if AI is _inevitably_ going to take away everyone's jobs, then we'd better make sure that it's US AI and not Chinese AI or some "rogue AI" that's doing it, and the government should 1) be in bed with us, 2) provide a financial backstop, and 3) not regulate us or put on the brakes so that we can stay ahead of the Chinese.
They don't care what the "normal" American thinks.
They've fired up the same irrational hordes that brought us flat earthing, anti-vax, and 5G Covid. It's just another parade of extreme ignorance. And yes, the SF crowd is comically oblivious to what they're dealing with, ivory tower style.
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
The comparisons to anti-vax and flat earth are absurd.
And what exactly is the benefit to you to having a data centre specifically in the area you live? Seems to me that far from “irrational hordes”, the protestors are standing up for their interests above the interests of the AI companies.
Opposition to AI data centers is completely rational, which is why both liberal and conservative folks are against it. These data centers are being forced on communities with soon-to-be-former leaders agreeing to nondisclosure agreements. They raise electricity prices. They are being slapped together with poor water recycling, and noisy diesel generators that pollute. The data centers for AI use a lot more resources than traditional ones. And the tech oligarchs think they can ram rush these things through, but they can't. People are sick of the lack of transparency. They're doing it all wrong to save a buck and a minute.
Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.
I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.
Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal. People are sick of tech companies bribing their way out of any accountability.
> A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power huge datacenters in Tennessee.
> xAI has been fighting for a year and a half over truck-sized gas turbines the company had parked near its Colossus 1 and 2 facilities, arguing to local authorities that the electricity-generating turbines were exempt from requirements for air quality permits.
> When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike
Why is that?
Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live.
I've been to a data center before due to work and my impression of the place was really good. It's kinda invisible from the outside, everything is extremely clean. There's no noise on the outside and the excess heat is used to get people cheap warm water or something like that.
I'm quite confused why people suddenly hate on them. Feels like I'm missing a whole lot of context.
So you can't just build things in Germany. Even if you just want to build a structure on your property. You need to get government approval first. Which can take years.
You won't get approval if whatever you want to build would impact things that way, meaning before you can build or even expand something like a data center you have to make sure the capacity is there or pay yourself to build it or pay to get a direct line from outside the city. Either way, other people won't need to pay more because of it.
And if they can't give capacity, they should maybe be required to give a kind of "call option" or hedge locals energy prices linked to regular inflation.
Companies are content to charge more in the short term to pay for the upgrades on the backs of the current subscribers as opposed to just charging the people for whom the extra load is desired.
Then these big buyers go ahead and pay 50% of what everyone else is paying.
Northern Virginia has tons of data centers because it had massive amounts of excess energy capacity.
That is now being consumed and now Loudon County will also start engaging in electricity price wars with data centers. New regulations to segregate markets is supposed to kick in on Jan 1 2027, in fact.
In part due to rising global prices of energy resources, which affect local markets and non-oil markets due to the (partial) fungibility of energy and the global nature of marketplaces.
> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production
I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.
I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.
And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.
Some older nuclear power plants are been commissioned back into production:
Three Mile Island
"2027 – Nuclear Regulatory Commission to decide whether to issue operating license to Constellation Energy, with the decision expected in May. If granted, Constellation expects to bring the reactor back online later in the year."
You don't need to build them. You can just not retire, or unretire one.
Though we really should get better at building nuclear power plants. I'm think more of small ones to power ships though, not land based ones. Ships are one of the few places where oil/coal are used that there are not realistic renewable alternatives.
So then does the data center compensate local residents for their higher power bills today? Until the new capacity comes online?
> Your requirements is like demanding nobody can buy a house unless they have pay they entire amount upfront.
No it's like demanding your new neighbors aren't forced to lend you money for your purchase - which is entirely reasonable. If you need money, get it from the bank.
The top-level comment explains it already:
"When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution."
For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years. An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
> For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years.
That's still better than 11-12 years. How long does a solar farm take?
If residents' opposition is rooted in higher power prices, data centers could just pay extra instead until the new capacity comes online. Seems like a cheap way to pay off opposition.
> An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
Given this article is about Pennsylvania, it'll probably take millions of years.
The famous evening duck curve, when people go home and cook and turn on heating/cooling appliances. California is able to flatten that out with batteries alone.
* The longest piece for wind is "Approvals and permits" which takes up to 5 years of the 4-7y.
* The building part "takes approximately 3-6 months" for building wind.
So wind can be built far faster if we're willing to speed up approvals and permitting.
And even if corners are cut for approvals/permitting, the worst case for a wind turbine failure is a lot better than a nuclear failure.
1. The 2 reactors under construction [1 > CONSTRUCTION] are expected to take 20 years and >20 years respectively [2][3].
2. Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told a parliamentary inquiry that "Japan's atomic safety rules are inferior to global standards and left the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster". There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese nuclear power companies. [4 (Bloomberg: "Nuclear Safety Chief Says Lax Rules Led to Fukushima Crisis")]
3. Additionally, your source is from more than 5 years ago; in those additional >5 years, neither of the 2 under-construction Japan plants (started in 2006 and 2010) have finished, and 1 is not expected until 2030 (I couldn't find an expected date for the other).
4. The phase you mentioned is a relatively small amount (~1/3) of a nuclear reactor's total startup timeline. [6]
5. Japan was the fastest country from your 2021 source (before taking into account that current JP builds are taking 20+ years).
6. The last Japan reactor to go online was in the 2000s [1 > OPERATION].
Japan learned from Fukishima nuclear accident, and many outside Japan forget that earthquake and tsunami had bigger impact in terms of material damage and cost of life then the nuclear accident.
Currently, economy of Japan (world biggest LNG importer) is hit hard by the events in Middle East. Because of this goverment starts maximum use of nuclear power policy.
That may be true, but does not change that the only 2 JP reactors built since the 2000s are each taking 2+ decades each to complete (started in 2006 and 2010, and estimated to launch in ___ and 2030).
Just a man on the street here—I sense it's more a backlash against tech-bros in general. People are seeing the world getting worse from tech and they're taking their pitchforks to the data centers and Flock cameras.
So not the massive Chinese bot farm (200K +) launching anti-datacenter propaganda campaigns? It's just the green energy concern? ("Spiking local prices" was one of the propaganda talking points.)
These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.
There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.
No a big part is that the buildings are ugly and transform the character of a place that folks grew up in. Maybe focus should be put on beautifying these buildings in some way
I don’t see how they are any uglier than any other industrial facility. That’s really what these are and it’s how they should be viewed. Typically most people don’t want to live next door to a factory, but there are some places where it’s appropriate to build them, often remote land or former industrial sites (brownfields) where you don’t want housing due to previous contamination.
Even if invisible they would not be a popular neighbour because they are a very overt reminder to the poor people around them how uneven the wealth and political power distribution is between them and the tech exec owners?
They should be popular - they pay property taxes to the local schools without taking much from the community at all. (note that I'm coming out against the all too common tax breaks that they get to build in your city)
They should be underground (that’s not shockingly expensive at the scale we talk about) and a net green-energy-driven power producer which they give away for free and pay property taxes. The list of things they could do that would be a cheap 1-2% of the total build and running costs to soften it are long.
People in my area are complaining about data centers being built in rural fields and on former aluminum plant and power plant sites. The debate has become pretty detached from reality. What remains rooted in reality mostly comes down to electric bills / power consumption and the fact that, as everyone is saying, it's the only way for people to push back against big tech billionaires.
It won’t necessarily impact local energy prices significantly. Some facilities build gas turbine generators, but these cause the noise that neighbors complain about. Gas isn’t as bad about pollution (except CO2) but you don’t want to live next door to a plant either.
Also, adding a few data centers to a large grid shouldn’t bump up the energy prices, it’s only when you add many across the area. This is difficult to pin down because if one side of a region builds many data centers without their own power generation, the whole region could see eventual price increases. Fortunately most (all?) states regulate utility price increases, but still you don’t want to max out the price bump year after year.
It’s hard to discuss because different facilities have different configurations, and the local impact depends on that plus local characteristics.
Given the externalities of large facilities like this, impacted neighbors should definitely get a vote. Maybe we need a standard to define the impact radius based on the facility characteristics. This would add transparency and make it easier for people to decide without FUD and distortion. Unfortunately I don’t have much confidence in anyone coming up with such a standard without altering it to benefit their side, now that it’s become a political football.
There's also the water usage, which time and time again they lie blatantly about, and they choose to want to often build these things in heavily populated drought-stressed areas for some foolish reason. And then you got clowns like Musk wantin' to build 'em entirely powered by dirty generators instead of any form of clean energy (which, I mean, if you're buildin' in drought-stressed sunny areas, why not some variant of solar, right?).
S'okay. Facts and reality don't matter. Everything's peachy-keen, folks. Just wander on by and downvote reality and it'll magically go away... :sigh:
All of those can be addressed by proper regulation. Banning them outright is the equivalent of banning all immigration just because there's some particular subgroup that people hate.
I oppose AI data centers the way they are being rolled out (which is not the same as I'm against data centers as a concept). Just like I'm anti "AI as it is being pushed", not against AI as a technology.
I'm not a moron. I do know what I'm talking about most of the time.
99% is an interesting figure because that's roughly how much my energy bill has increased despite no significant change in my usage due to data center demand on the grid
Buddy I work in world class premier data centers and I don’t want more of ‘em either. I appreciate that you think I’m a moron though for wanting to protect my community from douchebags like yourself. But respectfully I reject your bullshit.
Residents of the state should get money for needing to live next to data centers and the use of their land/natural resources/etc, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund.
They already do, indirectly. The local government gets property taxes from these data centers. But maybe it would be more real for people if you just wrote them a check I guess.
The local government gets property taxes from these data centers.
Not if they get a sweetheart tax deal. Why do you think folks are so pissy? It’s like a sports stadium next to your house in that the principals get tax breaks, eminent domain, and other considerations, but it makes noise every day(not just weekends) and you don’t get to go to the game.
Even with a state sweetheart tax deal, the most populated county in my state gets half of its property tax income from a datacenter. Projection for one in my county looks like it would hit 70%.
tbh I'm more worried about the resource curse from the sudden change in budget
The sweetheart deals are usually from the state, sometimes the county. Town budgets tend to be so small that ~$20m/yr will have the council falling over themselves to approve it.
The problem, from the cases I have looked at, seems to be that towns want to do dumb shit with this money rather than just cut residents a tax break.
Or the towns are not rich enough to fight in a lawsuit after the town council initially says no, which is how my local datacenter was approved against the will of the people
The sweetheart deals I've seen has been the state approving things that mostly affect the locals. A large part of property tax goes to local governments who were given no input in the deal.
I think people are pissy because they're scared of AI and have consumed a lot of misinformation. Most people I know still think that datacenters are going to literally drain the lakes. No one is actually informed on the details, it's all just become a meme at this point.
Unless local governments are getting bribed en masse, literally no municipality would want a datacenter if there wasn't a net benefit. I checked in my area and the datacenters are receiving tax breaks, but they also have to pay into the local school districts and fund the energy infrastructure buildout. Just because tax breaks are part of the deal doesn't mean there isn't a net benefit for the community.
I think people are pissy because they're scared of AI and have consumed a lot of misinformation
Just uninformed, are they? To some extent, perhaps they are. OTOH, tech bros aren’t helping any, with Musk’s Memphis DC being the poster child for why you don’t want a DC in your town. They’ll come to your town, make a bunch of noise and pollution, and dare you to enforce the law. “Can’t happen here”? It’s already happened elsewhere.
No one is actually informed on the details, it's all just become a meme at this point.
Perhaps the principals should be more forthcoming about these deals, rather than springing them on the public after the deal is done, then everyone can be well-informed. As it is, such things have been decided in non-public meetings in enough places to cause some skepticism.
I have no idea where you live, but the exact opposite is true everywhere I've lived in the US south. Big businesses pay next to zero tax while residents and small businesses bear the entire tax burden
Everyone against data centers is doing cost-benefit analysis. If the data center folks want to solve this, work on that ratio. And both sides, if you please, since the perceived benefit right now is basically zero.
It's just sad that Americans only unite when it's something in their own backyard. Democracy in the US is collapsing, and people are standing idly by. Maybe they'll leave an angry comment under a TikTok video, but that's about all the patriotism people seem to muster.
People don't want the billionaires coming into your town and having their way with it, the one you live in and are supposed to get a say in how things are done. This is not difficult to understand.
You tell everyone AI is going to put them out of a job and then you’re surprised when working class communities say “no, please leave” when folks want to build a data center in their back yard.
There are times when Silicon Valley looks out of touch and there are times when Silicon Valley just looks like idiots with hubris. This is more the later.
There are many surveys which make it clear, this is not the reason. They are straightforwardly (right or wrong) protesting the physical installations, their water and electricity use, and other hard-to-quantify vibes like radiation and noise (similar to 5g protests).
They know very little about the job market impact of AI, and are mostly retired so they don't care anyway.
“Mostly retired” is a red herring. Protests of all kinds are always full of retirees. They can speak up for the community while the rest of us have to go to work.
Thinking that the folks objecting are mostly grumpy retired people clueless about markets isn’t helping the perception that Silicon Valley is grossly out of touch with reality.
The protestors are mostly retired, and are not familiar (or most often, are actively skeptical of) the job market impact. These are just the facts, let's please not disagree on things where it is so easy to verify the ground truth.
In fact, the majority of people cite the data centers as (1) "AI slop machines", (2) a bubble that will burst leaving a data center behind or (3) surveillance factories. Very few think they will produce useful output. This is completely at odds with the idea they will displace the job market.
The intense anti-DC sentiment shouldn't be surprising - NIMBYism is the only viable mechanism available to people in the US. It doesn't matter if you're worried about Glonzo or have real concerns, they must be expressed in NIMBY terms in order to be heard.
For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.
There's lots of AI capex that is low risk. If it ends up being under utilized companies like Amazon and Google will adjust their capex plans. When they say things like under spending is riskier than overspending, for them, that's plausible.
But the sketchiest part of the bubble is when you directly bolt a no name data center company to Nvidia's cash pile, and you start turning cash into ever-lengthening receivables collection time, that's why people are skeptical of data centers: even if they can't tell a Google data center from a pivoting crypto bros data center, they smell the bullshit.
People also know they are being lied to, Oracle claims their New Mexico data center will run on Bloom fuel cells. I doubt Bloom is ready to scale to data center size without proof of concept in different applications at large if not directly comparable scale.
Anyone who has never lived next to a data center is commentating on the side lines without experience about what it’s actually like.
Lots of these commentaries miss the following:
- noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging
- rises costs of power and water
- more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns
The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.
And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.
1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];
2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and
3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].
All of this is relevant here.
The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.
So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.
So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.
This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.
As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc.
I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.
I remember the fracking roll out here. The companies involved directly handed checks to local residents, promised to train locals for new jobs, paid to fund schools, and so on.
These companies have a lot of money behind them - if they're not willing to put in the effort to convince local residents that the data center will be good for them, I feel like that's on them. They could easily do some handouts and fix this. Offer to pay extra taxes to the state or whatever, fund a new power plant, pay everyone who lives nearby the DC some thousands of dollars, whatever.
The older I get the more and more convinced I become that the media is the actual real enemy of the country. Their lifeblood is creating controversy and drama about everything so they can show ads. So insane that so few call them out (probably because most people are already "captured" by them).
> As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims.
But have they disproportionately amplified them? I follow some energy experts, and the consensus for AI-focused mega-datacenters seems to be "no". Some interesting reports:
it certainly seems to be. if it were just a matter of noise, or discharging contaminated water, or waste gasses we're supposed to have rules for these things. any facility that does these things is supposed to adhere to them.
so the issue isn't about data centers at all, but the fact that we've decided to stop enforcing even minimal environmental standards.
water consumption is another one, we just haven't done a very good of realizing that its a limited resource and trying to manage it.
the other is raising electrical rates. it should just be a real problem to raise rates to pay for Capex for other non-residential customers.
those are all real issues. 'people are going to get screwed' is a culture war thing, particularly if their opinion seems to be against environmental regulation as a matter of course. if a data center isn't noisy and polluting, and doesn't impact water or electrical consumption, then there is no sane reason to be against it. there are data centers that use close loop cooling. there are those that don't effect your rates. there are ones that are not really close to residences.
I can actually speak to this as someone in ruralish Pennsylvania whose town is going through one of these backlashes pretty heavily.
The major issue, at least in my neighborhood, is location more than anything else. We have a lot of industrially zoned areas that are great for data center location, and where they could be surrounded by other established industrial builds (think soda bottling plants, warehouses, transportation depos, semiconductor fabs, etc.) All the infrastructure is built out, electricity needs, etc. There is also a ton of land that exists that could be used for this purpose pretty distantly from town centers, if you can convince the gov/owners to part with it.
But despite this, the folks who want to expand data centers are instead trying to push instead into residential areas, or otherwise on land that would basically butt you up against pre-existing neighborhoods. Where I lack insight is if it's a matter of industrial property being too expensive compared to the swathes of otherwise unused land (at least that isn't used for state forests or whatnot,) or if there just literally is no room available for what they want to build out. But all the aspects of having bought your land to be in a residential area suddenly become way busy, value might go down because it's now in this weird quasi-industrial zone.
While there are legitimate concerns about the electricity/water usage, I (tinfoil hat) think that this is more of a game of influence/propaganda/state-level interest in an subject where it's easy to sow seeds of dissent. I personally think the electricity/water thing is a concern on a bigger scale than just individual utility bills, but it's blown out of proportion under that guise by conveniently cherry picking data from extreme examples. I also (more tinfoil) think that there's a lot of money changing hands since the AI boom is still growing and people are desperate to try to make a buck asap in any way possible, regardless of what may come tomorrow, so they're more willing to make a profit off of everything, but I have no legitimate proof of this.
Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.
I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.
2015 to 2024...?
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years (26% annual growth rate)
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years (73% annual growth rate)
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The 2015 - 2024 growth curve would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth (which is obviously accelerating), especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
You misunderstood I think. They aren't arguing water is a bigger problem than energy. They are arguing that negative perception is mostly focused around water use.
They suggested (and linked to paper arguing) that data centers are not causing energy prices to go up.
I am saying the paper's scope of analysis (up to 2024) renders it pretty much irrelevant.
And that's very suspicious given that they published the paper in 2026. Was it somehow impossible to find energy prices for 25+26?
What exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true?
Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...
They do use water, and the numbers look very large which makes for big scary headlines. However people who actually know how water is used in a city are used to numbers much larger than that.
it's the demand delta, not the total demand, that's concerning. Also not all use cases are created equal: using water to keep people alive is legitimate and using water to build a machine that can automatically almost count the number of vowels in a sentence is not legitimate, especially when that usage drives up demand and makes it harder to use water to keep people alive.
Why do you get to choose what is and isn’t legitimate?
Well "you" don't "get to", but this is precisely why we made the concept "states" and use "state power" to counteract other natural modalities of power.
Which is being demonstrated by the use of state power to kill data center development.
Yeah but it's all Chinese propaganda so it doesn't count this time. /s
Yeah, it’s one thing when SV runs the Uber script (ignoring the law to build big enough to buy politicians) to hurt cab drivers. It’s very different when it’s your neighborhood.
golf courses use much more. But you don’t see massive resistance against new golf courses being planned.
Farms use an order of magnitude more than either. You don’t see any demands whatsoever on agriculture to reduce water usage.
Sure. Those should be addressed, too.
The difference is they already exist while the datacenters don't. And its a lot easier, in a democracy, to stop a thing from being built in the first place than to tear it down after the fact, what with pesky laws about private property and so forth.
Or are you really saying that if we can't solve all water usage problems then we shouldn't solve or prevent any? Is that what you're suggesting?
I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event. And there is definitely no explosion of new golf courses. Total DC power consumption growth is practically exponential for the last 5 years.
>I would expect that a golf course construction is relatively rare event
That's just status quo bias, given that they're an ongoing source of water consumption. "oh it doesn't matter that [thing] is guzzling water, because it's already there!".
Exactly right. It's a lot easier to prevent an asshat venture than it is to dismantle it. Now that the public is aware, I wouldn't be surprised if new golf courses start getting the same treatment.
They haven’t been. I’m aware of new golf courses being planned in my area and I hear nothing but enthusiasm. Literally no one brings up water consumption as a concern.
This whole thing is a sublimation of vaguer anxieties about AI (which are perfectly rational!) into areas where people feel like they can make more concrete objections that are likelier to succeed. The water thing is completely fake, whether people think so or not.
Not entirely. Lack of regulations mean recycled water facilities can end up being consumption facilities with pollution risk. Also Meta plans to restore as much water as they use by 2030. Which, seems like a while to break even. That's primarily because ai data centers require a lot more cooling water and power than traditional ones. So, you can scream fake news all you want, but it is a concern and it is a good way to oppose ai in general. And power consumption, noise pollution, and pollution are also serious issues. "Whatabout this worse thing" is a pretty terrible argument. You can whatabout anything, but it doesn't make that thing any less bad. aka two wrongs don't make a right.
It’s not just whataboutism, it’s pointing out that the people up in arms about data center water usage don’t even know about the long list of things that use way more water than data centers, and when told, they don’t care.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to conclude that their beef is not really with water usage as much as a general hatred of AI, big tech, etc, and water usage is an easy thing to focus on.
golf courses don't contaminate the water supply. Amazon was just forced to settled a lawsuit for 20 million because they took a community's water supply and made it undrinkable. Now they'll be paying to improve public water treatment infrastructure and dig deeper wells looking for cleaner water. When's the last time a golf course had to do that?
Some do, some use closed-loop systems that are essentially 'charge once'. higher energy use, but less water
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, most of the new facilities (e.g. Stargate) are running closed loop systems. PUE goes up a bit if you have to use chillers, but ultimately it's faster/easier to build a large facility in a closed loop fashion than get water (permitting, treatment, etc.). NVIDIA pushing 45C inlet temps is to allow facilities to run dry coolers instead of chillers and make this even easier! Two phase cooling (required above ~3kW TDP) would eliminate water use in the secondary loop (if not the primary, eventually).
Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology so who is dropping the ball?
Yeah, all these stupid little municipalities have to do is shit they've literally never had to do before while getting sued out of their socks by literal trillion dollar companies.
That's all it takes for them to do their part in generating gargantuan amounts of value for people who live 1,000 miles away and their uberwealthy hardly-human CEOs and investors.
In the case of one amazon data center the town already had nitrates in their water due to agricultural runoff, but at levels that weren't a problem. Amazon took in hundreds of millions of gallons of that water for cooling, which evaporated away some of the water, but left the nitrates. Then amazon dumped the concentrated nitrate 'waste water' at such high volumes that it was pushed so deep into ground that it reached the aquifer contaminating the source for some 45k people. Soon people's taps were delivering water contaminated at 10x the legal limit. People got sick. A bunch of parents lost their babies.
Amazon was forced to settle for 20 million which will pay for digging to find uncontaminated water sources deeper in the ground. They'll also pay for water treatments to help remove the excess nitrates.
Data centers don't have to bring in new toxins and pollutants. They can also make existing problems much much worse.
This doesn't even make any sense. "deeper in the ground" is mostly wishful thinking. Why wouldn't the contamination spread? How can anyone be sure there is even potable water deeper?
With regular rainfall/usage the nitrates don't get far enough down to reach the aquifer. The nitrates get filtered naturally and remain in upper layers of the soil. Amazon concentrated the contamination and drove it far enough down that it reached and contaminated the aquifer, but below that the father down you dig and pull up water the less contaminated it will be. Part of the settlement is a fund for digging new private wells deep enough that the water contamination is under legal limits. I guess if there's no clean water below the contamination they'll have to stop using wells entirely and depend on treated water from the contaminated source.
> Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though?
One recent-ish example: ^[1]
> ... or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices?
I believe their contractor was responsible for this one IIRC?
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2026/07/09/meta...
The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:
1. Replacing forests and fields with concrete buildings prevents rainwater from filtering into the soil, which stops local aquifers from recharging.
2. During storms the rain runs off impervious surfaces and can cause downstream flooding.
3. Heavy land grading washes loose sediment into nearby waterways, destroying aquatic habitats and turning private drinking wells muddy. (That especially gets local homeowners angry and gets lots of video views).
And then you have the ongoing operation of open cooling systems:
4. Evaporative cooling systems discharge concentrated mineral brine that spikes the salinity of freshwater ecosystems.
5. Cooling water is treated with toxic biocides and anti-scalants that can contaminate local water basins. It can also contain leached copper, zinc, and PFAS.
6. Discharging warm wastewater depletes oxygen in streams and alters the overall ecology.
Of course all of these issues could be mitigated to a reasonable degree with proper care and effort:
>this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly
Do you want to bet your whole town on things being done properly right now?
All of this applies to all construction of all types. There are already plenty of environmental regulations around buildings and their construction. Maybe these aren't being enforced, maybe the laws need to be stricter. I'm not an expert but it sounds plausible. But if that's the case, we have to fix those problems otherwise you're just playing whack-a-mole with development. When you specifically focus on datacenters and stopping datacenters it gives away that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for your actual goals.
It seems like many of these town council debates are citizens asking for the laws to be enforced.
The first three apply to any construction project with a paved surface and there are ways to mitigate that, you can collect the runoff in a cistern/tank that filters back into the groundwater or collect it in a retention pond which does the same thing.
Items 4 and 5 apply to any facility with cooling towers, not limited to but including hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, prisons, cold storage warehouses, combined cycle power plants, large commercial buildings, paper plants, retirement homes, commercial bakeries, industrial facilities with heat rejection needs, etc.
The sixth one applies to virtually every power plant in existence.
Yes, and...? Data centers are the large projects being built right now. Often in communities with no prior experience with projects of such scale.
I don't doubt that politics plays a role, but we also can't deny that the current moment is a different category.
how would this mess with a water supply though, or are we talking the private wells? with a private well though it's something you want to mitigate either way, filters, etc, granted I have only seen the handful of clips where someone is showing dirty water coming out of the tap and I am trying to trace the chain of responsibility for the water supply, thanks for the detailed response btw
My county, for example, only processes surface water. If someone altered our upstream collection or polluted the reservoir, it would be a very big deal.
For private wells: if you're a rural person who previously had perfectly fine water, and now someone comes along to mess with that, even if it "just" requires installing expensive new equipment, you're going to be pissed.
>The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:
The first 3 apply to all construction. It's just being selectively applied because people hate datacenters.
My understanding is that they don't but there's a measurable amount of the population that thinks they can.
Well I don't have the data in front of me, but building power capacity leads to higher capacity payments, which are passed to all consumers. This has been an global industry standard for decades at far as I know.
The study's authors acknowledge it in the text.
> We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach.
This is a good primer on capacity payments: https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment
There is a methodical issue with that study that the authors acknowledge.
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...
People should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
There it is.
>your evidence for increasing energy prices
it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.
There's a global market for energy. What you see at the pump translates into electricity prices in a slow and grinding process. Remember that most of our electricity is not generated from renewable sources! Three years ago Russia invaded Ukraine, that pushed up fuel prices and electricity prices have followed. Now, we have the Iran war and that will push up electricity prices even more. The issue here is that you do not understand these markets.
The effects of Russian War had normalized by 2024. Or the paper would have shown an increase in Electricity tariffs.
And the effects of Iran War are not apparent.
I would recommend reading the actual paper where it acknowledges that it does not regard capacity payments.
https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment
> In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears,
where I am the water is a part of it, but a big issue is electricity prices going up (which they will)
Also Sam, Dario et al have constantly (like literally, every single week at least) been telling us that AI is going to make all of us unemployable and have to live on welfare.
Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?
The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
But the question shouldn't be, do you want datacentres or not? Datacentres are gonna be built in China or elsewhere.
The question should be, do you prefer to have them also built in the US or do you agree to have China (or another country) controlling AI in the future?
If AI is really gonna make everyone unemployable, then it seems to me like you would want them to be built in your country, not in another country, especially not one you disagree with.
Of course they're still the question of where exactly there are built and how to compensate for the nuisances they may bring.
> The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
I doubt that it's ignorance on their part. I think their target audience with those comments is the US government, basically setting up OpenAI/Anthropic as "too big to fail" in the sense that "if AI is _inevitably_ going to take away everyone's jobs, then we'd better make sure that it's US AI and not Chinese AI or some "rogue AI" that's doing it, and the government should 1) be in bed with us, 2) provide a financial backstop, and 3) not regulate us or put on the brakes so that we can stay ahead of the Chinese.
They don't care what the "normal" American thinks.
They've fired up the same irrational hordes that brought us flat earthing, anti-vax, and 5G Covid. It's just another parade of extreme ignorance. And yes, the SF crowd is comically oblivious to what they're dealing with, ivory tower style.
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
The comparisons to anti-vax and flat earth are absurd.
And what exactly is the benefit to you to having a data centre specifically in the area you live? Seems to me that far from “irrational hordes”, the protestors are standing up for their interests above the interests of the AI companies.
Ignorant? Do enlightened people want to live next door to noisy data centres?
Opposition to AI data centers is completely rational, which is why both liberal and conservative folks are against it. These data centers are being forced on communities with soon-to-be-former leaders agreeing to nondisclosure agreements. They raise electricity prices. They are being slapped together with poor water recycling, and noisy diesel generators that pollute. The data centers for AI use a lot more resources than traditional ones. And the tech oligarchs think they can ram rush these things through, but they can't. People are sick of the lack of transparency. They're doing it all wrong to save a buck and a minute.
Exactly
Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.
I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.
Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal. People are sick of tech companies bribing their way out of any accountability.
> Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal.
Yeah, Elon's a big fan of this tactic.
Source for the above claim, although it was actually methane gas turbines: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
> A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power huge datacenters in Tennessee.
> xAI has been fighting for a year and a half over truck-sized gas turbines the company had parked near its Colossus 1 and 2 facilities, arguing to local authorities that the electricity-generating turbines were exempt from requirements for air quality permits.
> When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike
Why is that?
Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live.
I've been to a data center before due to work and my impression of the place was really good. It's kinda invisible from the outside, everything is extremely clean. There's no noise on the outside and the excess heat is used to get people cheap warm water or something like that.
I'm quite confused why people suddenly hate on them. Feels like I'm missing a whole lot of context.
Unless the German government is subsidizing or fixing the cost, that is not possible.
Infrastructure requires new capacity to be build, which requires capacity payments.
So you can't just build things in Germany. Even if you just want to build a structure on your property. You need to get government approval first. Which can take years.
You won't get approval if whatever you want to build would impact things that way, meaning before you can build or even expand something like a data center you have to make sure the capacity is there or pay yourself to build it or pay to get a direct line from outside the city. Either way, other people won't need to pay more because of it.
And if they can't give capacity, they should maybe be required to give a kind of "call option" or hedge locals energy prices linked to regular inflation.
Companies are content to charge more in the short term to pay for the upgrades on the backs of the current subscribers as opposed to just charging the people for whom the extra load is desired.
Then these big buyers go ahead and pay 50% of what everyone else is paying.
That's not the main issue at all. I'm baffled where you got that idea.
Also, I live in Northern Virginia where we have tons of data centers, and energy prices have not spiked.
Northern Virginia has tons of data centers because it had massive amounts of excess energy capacity.
That is now being consumed and now Loudon County will also start engaging in electricity price wars with data centers. New regulations to segregate markets is supposed to kick in on Jan 1 2027, in fact.
Wow, you have insanely, enviably cheap power.
But also, it seems to have increased in price quite a bit lately.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS35A72610
Or the fact everyone's utility bills are going up.
In part due to rising global prices of energy resources, which affect local markets and non-oil markets due to the (partial) fungibility of energy and the global nature of marketplaces.
> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production
I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.
I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.
And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.
That includes nuclear power, correct?
I'm fine with any power source, but all sources should include all lifetime externality costs (including for fossil/nuclear/renewable):
* Externality costs for items like pollution
* Any required insurance cost during their lifetime (not subsidized)
* An up-front bond or similar to cover final decommissioning and any required long-term storage costs (again, for fossil/renewable/nuclear)
Can they build it safely as fast as the data center it's meant to power? Full steam ahead then.
Some older nuclear power plants are been commissioned back into production:
Three Mile Island
"2027 – Nuclear Regulatory Commission to decide whether to issue operating license to Constellation Energy, with the decision expected in May. If granted, Constellation expects to bring the reactor back online later in the year."
https://www.witf.org/2026/07/28/three-mile-island-reactor-re...
Michigan’s Palisades nuclear power plant
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/americas-first-...
Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nextera-energy-partn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Arnold_Energy_Center#Res...
If electricity bills are steady or falling they should have no trouble convincing voters. Nothing to worry about.
You don't need to build them. You can just not retire, or unretire one.
Though we really should get better at building nuclear power plants. I'm think more of small ones to power ships though, not land based ones. Ships are one of the few places where oil/coal are used that there are not realistic renewable alternatives.
It can be a little later. Your requirements is like demanding nobody can buy a house unless they have pay they entire amount upfront.
People do not believe big companies when they say "I'll deal with the externalities a little later."
So then does the data center compensate local residents for their higher power bills today? Until the new capacity comes online?
> Your requirements is like demanding nobody can buy a house unless they have pay they entire amount upfront.
No it's like demanding your new neighbors aren't forced to lend you money for your purchase - which is entirely reasonable. If you need money, get it from the bank.
The top-level comment explains it already:
"When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution."
It typically takes 11-12 years for a nuclear plant to get built including planning and construction [1].
Is the idea that we'd build the data centers now, and finish the nuclear plants to power them 11-12 years from now?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-timeline-of-a-nu...
For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years. An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
https://jmhpower.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-wind-t...
> For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years.
That's still better than 11-12 years. How long does a solar farm take?
If residents' opposition is rooted in higher power prices, data centers could just pay extra instead until the new capacity comes online. Seems like a cheap way to pay off opposition.
> An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
Given this article is about Pennsylvania, it'll probably take millions of years.
> How long does a solar farm take?
24–48 months, but for a data center that has to run 24/7 you need to also build a gas power plant.
https://www.pvfarm.io/blog/utility-scale-solar-project-devel...
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-ce...
Or use batteries.
Also residential and industrial use will be lower at night. So the existing grid supply may also be enough.
In many places the contraty is true, peak electricity prices are after sunset, during night.
> peak electricity prices are after sunset
The famous evening duck curve, when people go home and cook and turn on heating/cooling appliances. California is able to flatten that out with batteries alone.
https://eticaag.com/battery-storage-and-the-duck-curve-march...
> during night
When everyone's asleep? Serious doubt, please show your sources.
> When everyone's asleep? Serious doubt, please show your sources.
Lot of industry, especialy heavy industry, chemical plants are running 24/7.
For expensive night prices see electricity prices in Europe, expensive natural gas, coal power production with carbom tax.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
The 2024 NYT infographic also has a nice visualization of how batteries flattened the evening curve as of then: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...
Adding to the sibling comment, from your link:
* The longest piece for wind is "Approvals and permits" which takes up to 5 years of the 4-7y.
* The building part "takes approximately 3-6 months" for building wind.
So wind can be built far faster if we're willing to speed up approvals and permitting. And even if corners are cut for approvals/permitting, the worst case for a wind turbine failure is a lot better than a nuclear failure.
By the time nuclear power were to come online in the US, most of these datacenters would be idled and possibly even demolished.
Nuclear power takes 10-20 years to build from scratch.
Median build time for 1 GW nuclear power plant in Japan was 1721 days (4.7 years), first concrete to grid connection.
https://x.com/GrantChalmers/status/1422472474487263233
1. The 2 reactors under construction [1 > CONSTRUCTION] are expected to take 20 years and >20 years respectively [2][3].
2. Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told a parliamentary inquiry that "Japan's atomic safety rules are inferior to global standards and left the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster". There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese nuclear power companies. [4 (Bloomberg: "Nuclear Safety Chief Says Lax Rules Led to Fukushima Crisis")]
3. Additionally, your source is from more than 5 years ago; in those additional >5 years, neither of the 2 under-construction Japan plants (started in 2006 and 2010) have finished, and 1 is not expected until 2030 (I couldn't find an expected date for the other).
4. The phase you mentioned is a relatively small amount (~1/3) of a nuclear reactor's total startup timeline. [6]
5. Japan was the fastest country from your 2021 source (before taking into account that current JP builds are taking 20+ years).
6. The last Japan reactor to go online was in the 2000s [1 > OPERATION].
[1] https://cnpp.iaea.org/public/countries/JP/profile/preview
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cma_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://pris-stats.iaea.org/reactor/862
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-16/nuclear-s...
[5] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-timeline-of-a-nu...
Japan learned from Fukishima nuclear accident, and many outside Japan forget that earthquake and tsunami had bigger impact in terms of material damage and cost of life then the nuclear accident.
Currently, economy of Japan (world biggest LNG importer) is hit hard by the events in Middle East. Because of this goverment starts maximum use of nuclear power policy.
https://www.nucnet.org/news/japan-council-adopts-policy-pack...
https://www.powermag.com/reactor-restart-rekindling-japans-n...
https://ieefa.org/resources/japans-diversified-lng-procureme...
That may be true, but does not change that the only 2 JP reactors built since the 2000s are each taking 2+ decades each to complete (started in 2006 and 2010, and estimated to launch in ___ and 2030).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cma_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://pris-stats.iaea.org/reactor/862
Just a man on the street here—I sense it's more a backlash against tech-bros in general. People are seeing the world getting worse from tech and they're taking their pitchforks to the data centers and Flock cameras.
(Of course I might simply be projecting.)
> I sense it's more a backlash against tech-bros in general.
I can almost guarantee there's a good bit of that also involved in addition to all the other concerns and issues folks also rightly have.
So not the massive Chinese bot farm (200K +) launching anti-datacenter propaganda campaigns? It's just the green energy concern? ("Spiking local prices" was one of the propaganda talking points.)
These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.
There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.
Ah, the good old "outside agitators" canard.
> These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity
And now you've got all the noise and pollution from that to deal with.
Some of the data centers build out solar, most are natural gas turbines.
The outside agitators are in the news. The U.S. just happens to be a little more vulnerable to "straight to the people" propaganda campaigns.
Propaganda, which the largest corporations on earth, including news media behemoths, would never, ever stoop to. Right?
No a big part is that the buildings are ugly and transform the character of a place that folks grew up in. Maybe focus should be put on beautifying these buildings in some way
I don’t see how they are any uglier than any other industrial facility. That’s really what these are and it’s how they should be viewed. Typically most people don’t want to live next door to a factory, but there are some places where it’s appropriate to build them, often remote land or former industrial sites (brownfields) where you don’t want housing due to previous contamination.
Even if invisible they would not be a popular neighbour because they are a very overt reminder to the poor people around them how uneven the wealth and political power distribution is between them and the tech exec owners?
They should be popular - they pay property taxes to the local schools without taking much from the community at all. (note that I'm coming out against the all too common tax breaks that they get to build in your city)
They should be underground (that’s not shockingly expensive at the scale we talk about) and a net green-energy-driven power producer which they give away for free and pay property taxes. The list of things they could do that would be a cheap 1-2% of the total build and running costs to soften it are long.
People in my area are complaining about data centers being built in rural fields and on former aluminum plant and power plant sites. The debate has become pretty detached from reality. What remains rooted in reality mostly comes down to electric bills / power consumption and the fact that, as everyone is saying, it's the only way for people to push back against big tech billionaires.
It won’t necessarily impact local energy prices significantly. Some facilities build gas turbine generators, but these cause the noise that neighbors complain about. Gas isn’t as bad about pollution (except CO2) but you don’t want to live next door to a plant either.
Also, adding a few data centers to a large grid shouldn’t bump up the energy prices, it’s only when you add many across the area. This is difficult to pin down because if one side of a region builds many data centers without their own power generation, the whole region could see eventual price increases. Fortunately most (all?) states regulate utility price increases, but still you don’t want to max out the price bump year after year.
It’s hard to discuss because different facilities have different configurations, and the local impact depends on that plus local characteristics.
Given the externalities of large facilities like this, impacted neighbors should definitely get a vote. Maybe we need a standard to define the impact radius based on the facility characteristics. This would add transparency and make it easier for people to decide without FUD and distortion. Unfortunately I don’t have much confidence in anyone coming up with such a standard without altering it to benefit their side, now that it’s become a political football.
There's also the water usage, which time and time again they lie blatantly about, and they choose to want to often build these things in heavily populated drought-stressed areas for some foolish reason. And then you got clowns like Musk wantin' to build 'em entirely powered by dirty generators instead of any form of clean energy (which, I mean, if you're buildin' in drought-stressed sunny areas, why not some variant of solar, right?).
S'okay. Facts and reality don't matter. Everything's peachy-keen, folks. Just wander on by and downvote reality and it'll magically go away... :sigh:
Many things divide us here: Wawa or Sheetz; cheesesteaks or pierogi; Eagles or Steelers; but I very glad we could come together on this.
why? data center opposition is just morons who don't know what they're talking about 99% of the time
Concerns about noise pollution and increased electricity costs are just morons?
What about concerns about air pollution from unregulated diesel generators? Or using large amounts of water in drought prone areas?
All of those can be addressed by proper regulation. Banning them outright is the equivalent of banning all immigration just because there's some particular subgroup that people hate.
> All of those can be addressed by proper regulation.
No it can't. Regulation is already being flouted.
> Banning them outright is the equivalent of banning all immigration
Please be less obvious, this is just insulting.
>No it can't. Regulation is already being flouted.
So regulations to ban datacenters work, but for some reason regulations to ban gas turbines or whatever doesn't work?
>Please be less obvious, this is just insulting.
Please be less obvious. You failing to rebut my argument and resorting to calling it "just insulting" is insulting.
> So regulations to ban datacenters work
Yes, as we see here.
> regulations to ban gas turbines or whatever doesn't work?
Yes, as we've seen elsewhere.
Anything else you're not clear on?
I wouldn’t be so coarse, but mostly yes. Data centres are hardly new, and the subset of legitimate criticisms problems are hardly unique.
> Data centres are hardly new
A commenter below quotes a 73% annual growth rate vs. 23% over the prior decade.
You don't think that'd have an effect on people's perception?
Perception, absolutely yes.
And physical, objective reality, too.
Damn their lying eyes!
so what you're saying is that the problems people have with new data centers are real and well-documented?
Care to expand?
Others already have elsewhere in this discussion.
I oppose AI data centers the way they are being rolled out (which is not the same as I'm against data centers as a concept). Just like I'm anti "AI as it is being pushed", not against AI as a technology.
I'm not a moron. I do know what I'm talking about most of the time.
>99% of the time
99% is an interesting figure because that's roughly how much my energy bill has increased despite no significant change in my usage due to data center demand on the grid
Buddy I work in world class premier data centers and I don’t want more of ‘em either. I appreciate that you think I’m a moron though for wanting to protect my community from douchebags like yourself. But respectfully I reject your bullshit.
Residents of the state should get money for needing to live next to data centers and the use of their land/natural resources/etc, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund.
They already do, indirectly. The local government gets property taxes from these data centers. But maybe it would be more real for people if you just wrote them a check I guess.
The local government gets property taxes from these data centers.
Not if they get a sweetheart tax deal. Why do you think folks are so pissy? It’s like a sports stadium next to your house in that the principals get tax breaks, eminent domain, and other considerations, but it makes noise every day(not just weekends) and you don’t get to go to the game.
Even with a state sweetheart tax deal, the most populated county in my state gets half of its property tax income from a datacenter. Projection for one in my county looks like it would hit 70%.
tbh I'm more worried about the resource curse from the sudden change in budget
The sweetheart deals are usually from the state, sometimes the county. Town budgets tend to be so small that ~$20m/yr will have the council falling over themselves to approve it.
The problem, from the cases I have looked at, seems to be that towns want to do dumb shit with this money rather than just cut residents a tax break.
Or the towns are not rich enough to fight in a lawsuit after the town council initially says no, which is how my local datacenter was approved against the will of the people
It's like an inverse representative democracy. A government committed to doing the opposite of the people's desires.
The sweetheart deals I've seen has been the state approving things that mostly affect the locals. A large part of property tax goes to local governments who were given no input in the deal.
I think people are pissy because they're scared of AI and have consumed a lot of misinformation. Most people I know still think that datacenters are going to literally drain the lakes. No one is actually informed on the details, it's all just become a meme at this point.
Unless local governments are getting bribed en masse, literally no municipality would want a datacenter if there wasn't a net benefit. I checked in my area and the datacenters are receiving tax breaks, but they also have to pay into the local school districts and fund the energy infrastructure buildout. Just because tax breaks are part of the deal doesn't mean there isn't a net benefit for the community.
I think people are pissy because they're scared of AI and have consumed a lot of misinformation
Just uninformed, are they? To some extent, perhaps they are. OTOH, tech bros aren’t helping any, with Musk’s Memphis DC being the poster child for why you don’t want a DC in your town. They’ll come to your town, make a bunch of noise and pollution, and dare you to enforce the law. “Can’t happen here”? It’s already happened elsewhere.
No one is actually informed on the details, it's all just become a meme at this point.
Perhaps the principals should be more forthcoming about these deals, rather than springing them on the public after the deal is done, then everyone can be well-informed. As it is, such things have been decided in non-public meetings in enough places to cause some skepticism.
While specifics vary by state and county, data centers have often been getting 100% property tax abatements good for decades.
I have no idea where you live, but the exact opposite is true everywhere I've lived in the US south. Big businesses pay next to zero tax while residents and small businesses bear the entire tax burden
New rev source = spend more as opposed to reduce taxpayer burden?
Billionaires don’t pay taxes, they receive tax breaks.
You can just do this for everything everywhere with near-zero enforcement complexity by instituting a high Land Value Tax
Everyone against data centers is doing cost-benefit analysis. If the data center folks want to solve this, work on that ratio. And both sides, if you please, since the perceived benefit right now is basically zero.
Archive link: http://archive.today/0Rxl7
Why don't they just buy extra land surrounding the data center to reduce noise pollution concerns?
Regardless hopefully this restarts nuclear power generation
I'm glad to see that people unite for things like this. This is important and necessary.
It's just sad that Americans only unite when it's something in their own backyard. Democracy in the US is collapsing, and people are standing idly by. Maybe they'll leave an angry comment under a TikTok video, but that's about all the patriotism people seem to muster.
People don't want the billionaires coming into your town and having their way with it, the one you live in and are supposed to get a say in how things are done. This is not difficult to understand.
Turns out putting them in space is the answer!
> Turns out putting them in space is the answer!
Can we put them on Mars, and maybe send Elon to tend them?
I am quite sure you are being facetious, but XRot has made me doubt everything.
You tell everyone AI is going to put them out of a job and then you’re surprised when working class communities say “no, please leave” when folks want to build a data center in their back yard.
There are times when Silicon Valley looks out of touch and there are times when Silicon Valley just looks like idiots with hubris. This is more the later.
There are many surveys which make it clear, this is not the reason. They are straightforwardly (right or wrong) protesting the physical installations, their water and electricity use, and other hard-to-quantify vibes like radiation and noise (similar to 5g protests).
They know very little about the job market impact of AI, and are mostly retired so they don't care anyway.
“Mostly retired” is a red herring. Protests of all kinds are always full of retirees. They can speak up for the community while the rest of us have to go to work.
Thinking that the folks objecting are mostly grumpy retired people clueless about markets isn’t helping the perception that Silicon Valley is grossly out of touch with reality.
The protestors are mostly retired, and are not familiar (or most often, are actively skeptical of) the job market impact. These are just the facts, let's please not disagree on things where it is so easy to verify the ground truth.
In fact, the majority of people cite the data centers as (1) "AI slop machines", (2) a bubble that will burst leaving a data center behind or (3) surveillance factories. Very few think they will produce useful output. This is completely at odds with the idea they will displace the job market.
The intense anti-DC sentiment shouldn't be surprising - NIMBYism is the only viable mechanism available to people in the US. It doesn't matter if you're worried about Glonzo or have real concerns, they must be expressed in NIMBY terms in order to be heard.
For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.
This is fair and I think it’s what is really happening here.
The only lever the government seems to have is tax breaks, and the only lever the people seem to have is NIMBYism. What a joke.
I think this is why I'm sort of excited about this, even if some of it's "misguided" according to some.
I haven't seen people really care and mobilize since maybe BLM?
There's lots of AI capex that is low risk. If it ends up being under utilized companies like Amazon and Google will adjust their capex plans. When they say things like under spending is riskier than overspending, for them, that's plausible.
But the sketchiest part of the bubble is when you directly bolt a no name data center company to Nvidia's cash pile, and you start turning cash into ever-lengthening receivables collection time, that's why people are skeptical of data centers: even if they can't tell a Google data center from a pivoting crypto bros data center, they smell the bullshit.
People also know they are being lied to, Oracle claims their New Mexico data center will run on Bloom fuel cells. I doubt Bloom is ready to scale to data center size without proof of concept in different applications at large if not directly comparable scale.
Do they promise?
Anyone who has never lived next to a data center is commentating on the side lines without experience about what it’s actually like.
Lots of these commentaries miss the following: - noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging - rises costs of power and water - more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns
The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.
And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.
Consider:
1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];
2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and
3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].
All of this is relevant here.
The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.
So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.
So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.
This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/
[3]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc.
I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.
I remember the fracking roll out here. The companies involved directly handed checks to local residents, promised to train locals for new jobs, paid to fund schools, and so on.
These companies have a lot of money behind them - if they're not willing to put in the effort to convince local residents that the data center will be good for them, I feel like that's on them. They could easily do some handouts and fix this. Offer to pay extra taxes to the state or whatever, fund a new power plant, pay everyone who lives nearby the DC some thousands of dollars, whatever.
The older I get the more and more convinced I become that the media is the actual real enemy of the country. Their lifeblood is creating controversy and drama about everything so they can show ads. So insane that so few call them out (probably because most people are already "captured" by them).
Dictatorships abolish all free press, they don't like it. There was a quote where I live "Free press dies along democracy" and it did.
But our press isn't free, it's bound by what gets dumb human brains to put their eyes on ads.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Oligarchy is still better than Monarchy
> As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims.
But have they disproportionately amplified them? I follow some energy experts, and the consensus for AI-focused mega-datacenters seems to be "no". Some interesting reports:
• Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI's Environmental and Human Effects - https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107172
• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission): "…approximately half of this [$5.1 billion] cost will be borne by customers…" - https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/commissioner-clements-...
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas: Processing Power: The Effect of Data Centers on Wholesale Electricity Markets - https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/...
we can probably generalize and say that anything that's a culture war issue has become disconnected with useful actionable reality.
This is not a culture war issue. And there are people posting real data ITT.
it certainly seems to be. if it were just a matter of noise, or discharging contaminated water, or waste gasses we're supposed to have rules for these things. any facility that does these things is supposed to adhere to them.
so the issue isn't about data centers at all, but the fact that we've decided to stop enforcing even minimal environmental standards.
water consumption is another one, we just haven't done a very good of realizing that its a limited resource and trying to manage it.
the other is raising electrical rates. it should just be a real problem to raise rates to pay for Capex for other non-residential customers.
those are all real issues. 'people are going to get screwed' is a culture war thing, particularly if their opinion seems to be against environmental regulation as a matter of course. if a data center isn't noisy and polluting, and doesn't impact water or electrical consumption, then there is no sane reason to be against it. there are data centers that use close loop cooling. there are those that don't effect your rates. there are ones that are not really close to residences.