I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them.
Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics.
There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.
The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns.
What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
It doesn't help that at least one datacenter operator and possibly more promised municipalities in Arizona that they wouldn't use their water and then secretly used millions of gallons. This in the middle of water shortages.
I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here, but 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year. It's really not that much water.
It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places.
The water sediment thing had nothing to do with the building being a data center I think? Any form of construction would interfere with people drinking well water next to it
Isn't that enough to rethink the construction - it takes a while to build a data center, and I would not be happy that I have to suffer with shitty water because a data center is being built for years.
> SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal.
To put a finer and much-angrier point on this:
1. Traditionally, Americans have been protected from certain kinds of harm by certain federal laws. Where present, these laws take priority (supremacy clause) over state laws. (i.e. The Clean Air Act.)
2. Due to certain people and one party controlling the federal government today, American communities are no longer getting justice under those laws. This is because the facility-owners (i.e. xAI and Elon Musk) are capable of bribing their way into flouting the law. (i.e. No enforcement from EPA, DoJ claims the facility needs a "national security" exception to pollute.)
3. Since communities are robbed of protection from federal laws, they must instead try to use state/local laws.
4. Due the responsibility-areas of federal-vs-state laws, this often means preventing the facility from being built at all, as opposed to limiting what it does when operating.
____
TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal compromise route, so they're partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures that actually work.
>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate
The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)
The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.
I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape.
Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time.
Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity.
These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box.
I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc.
A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less.
It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
>Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room?
That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster.
Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall.
But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes.
If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method.
> Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you.
Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR.
> Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby
I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere.
Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace.
> because someone failed to do PR
They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion.
I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices.
The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer.
What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve?
If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them?
I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…)
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4].
The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.)
Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem.
I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs.
The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things.
Nah, I back the Abundance movement and have voted for building new housing complexes in my town against groups who claimed it would ruin the character of our town to have a 60 acre plot near an old industrial center turned into neighborhoods.
Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building.
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.
This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.
Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.
Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount.
Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate.
(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)
The data center might be more attractive but the office building provides more jobs and resources to the local community. You skipped that point in your reply. Even if most of the people working in the office building aren't from the area, those people are getting food and other services from local businesses. All that money goes to the local community and supports local businesses.
Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right?
Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right?
I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways
First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't?
> Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc?
I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice!
But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right?
Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction?
(in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?)
(Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better)
No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of it. CHI1 is ringed by a single two-sided line of spots. Every big box retailer is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt larger than CHI1 itself.
You'd take a featureless, opaque warehouse over a structure with windows and architecture that was intended to stand out? The asphalt doesn't have to be an eyesore if planned well, either. Copious vegetation woven throughout, painted teal or with murals instead of black, a policy of "after the following hours, locals are allowed to play roller-hockey and tennis here.", host regular farmer's markets, etc.
That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? The data centers? Also what does the specific building or set of buildings you hate in one town have to do with the concept of office buildings
> That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work?
Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople.
These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office.
I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.
I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?
Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.
I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.
> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community
This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit.
I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods.
Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue.
>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise
For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
You might want to let the angry townspeople know because they're already passing symbolic measures and convincing the abuelas they're going to drain Lake Michigan to power these things:
I think trains are ok with trees. I checked satellite view - there are a lot of rail tracks in Chicago going directly along tree lines. The rail yards indeed look like tracks on concrete with nothing else, but when I look at German ones - there are trees and bushes.
A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.
This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers.
Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know?
> But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls
You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7.
Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.
No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything.
Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
We've "imported" this concern to the UK too, largely driven by the same issues seemingly whipped up by US lack of regulation much more than local examples (that's not to say there have been no cases of bad buildouts here).
Many of the people now extremely opposed to data centres seem to believe the UK didn't have any data centres recently, never mind that you can pass by data centres in e.g. London Docklands and mistake it for an office building. In some cases they are in a subset of floors of office buildings.
I'm all for regulating them so they need to account for externalities, but the blind opposition to them is frustrating, not least because it means there's no pressure to deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects.
> deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects
Two counterpoints:
- the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
- for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
> the user instead of in big centralized facilities
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
That's working under the (imo wrong) assumption that LLMs are what we need/want. First, because pushing toward the user can happen as shared hosting in your municipality and doesn't have to be in every home. Second, because if you take slop, adtech, and surveillance out of the equation, the material impact is several orders of magnitude less than what's being built today. Or for what it's worth, several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
As modern datacenters go, 69,000 sq ft for a whole facility is REALLY small. Only some portion of that 69k is going to be actual conditioned space once you subtract all the ancillary services, things like security office, staging area, bathrooms, electrical breaker panel rooms, etc. It's almost like boutique/niche sized compared to the things that are going up in Texas, Indiana, a few other places. I know people building hyperscale size stuff that would almost call 69k sq ft hobby sized.
The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana
You can't without making an effort to reduce your dependence on it. The most anti DC people I see are chronically online blasting their shit all over social media. Typically influencers, who make a living using said DCs, all day long. Social media directly supports what they are against. There are other ways to spread your message and when they choose the one method that directly goes against the message they are trying to put out, I'm not going to take them seriously, and will also assume they don't know what they're talking about.
I think that’s how DCs mark an exponential growth in NIMBYism and its acceptance - we’re already seeing city-wide, county-wide, even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density. If this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted, I expect to see similar broader bans against multi-family housing, mass-transit, etc.
Based on what? Slippery slope fallacy? There are real reasons why people don’t want their community to have a DC, which are wildly different than the entitled NIMBYism that isn’t against multi-family housing and mass transit.
Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Many of the same reasons used against dense housing, mass transit, and solar/wind turbines are used against DCs -
such as claims:
* That it would be too much for the existing grid to handle
* That it would be too much for existing other utilities to handle
* That it would be too close to x other thing (zoo, etc)
* Some say it won't be visually appealing
* That it would change the nature of the existing area
* That there isn't enough groundwater
* etc.
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Wouldn't the complaints then be that a DC there would spoil the area's natural beauty (and would be too much for the electric grid there, etc)? Or if the DC were located similarly to how this one is, there would be the same complaints as OP case - see the photo at the very top of the OP article - it shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
>> even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
1. You say you would change your mind in that particular place, but are you arguing that others wouldn't NIMBY against Atherton if one were proposed there? Everyone has different ideas about where they believe should be NIMBYd, including because people have different 'backyards'? And I presume your 'backyard' is tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles from the OP DC location?
2. With state-level bans already existing in states where much of the state is very low-density, the evidence seems to show the opposite of your claim that if a very low-density area were picked then it wouldn't face a ban.
> There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).
Maybe, but "this would probably have been fine five years ago" is not a very reassuring standard. The physical impact matters more than whether the racks are running email servers or training models.
A traditional colo DC isn't running super power dense GPUs and doesn't use water cooling. These exist in whatever city you live in and no one knows where they are because there is no impact. They are completely different beasts.
Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?
>Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space
Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws. I would personally vote against polticians who enacted those kinds of regulations; and if they passed anyway I would attempt to mine and use cryptocurrency in ways that circumvented the regulations banning me from doing so.
>> The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws.
Thats exactly correct. The killer app for crypto is criminal enterprise. Yes there are other niches, but nothing that would sustain the industry.
Passing a regulation regarding mining would be difficult to enforce. It's impossible to know what a GPU inside the data center is doing.
At this point the industry is legit, even promoted by individuals in govt (who overtly sell access (cough bribe) using it. So no, you don't need to worry, there's no risk of regulations like this anywhere soon.
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
I work in commercial real and even I'm going to go NIMBY mode on this lol. This property shares a large boundary to the zoo and I have a very hard time believing you won't cause an impact (noise pollution eg) to the animals next door.
Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.
IMO noise pollution is the easiest one to solve: just put all the AC fans on the far side of the datacenter. If not enough, surround with noise absorbing panels. If not enough, just get a different fan design, more coolers, and run them at half speed. They can even afford Noctua :)
I bet nearby rail yard produces way more loud noises.
Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.
This is more a harbinger of what is about to happen all over the country. So the specifics matter less than it marking the political ascendancy of the backlash to AI / data centers / big tech / billionaires...
One of the guys leading the effort is active on threads (probably twitter too). He has no interest in negotiating. He is gloating over his win hardcore and has very absolutist views when it comes to datacenters
What I think is nice is that the political parties opposed to data center development are actually taking concrete steps, exercising specific powers, to advance their goals.
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
If the city thinks data centers are incompatible with certain areas, it should encode that through zoning, permitting, utility pricing, noise limits, etc.
We have those but data centers keep skirting them. Data center developers often classify their properties as "light industrial" or "warehouse" to bypass regulation. These lobbyists are also big enough to push state legislation that strips local towns and counties of land-use authority.
Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound
I feel like that is besides the point. I think the fact that ended up this way is an illustration how hardened the public has become. There's no niceties, procedure. The public has been pushed well past that point. This is not a negotiation.
Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.
No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.
It feels like this is the first time I've seen the political system move in tune with the public mood in regards to AI and this is public anger finding expression in public policy.
Even billionaires really don't operate as individuals, they are a monster that we've let grow to have unchecked power across the entire federal government.
(note, I may be agreeing with what you're saying I just don't agree with the framing of the "individual") Most of the pushback belongs against the entities that are more powerful than even the federal government at times.)
I live in Nashville. This story is all over the place in general. People assume all the things like it will make their rates go up, etc.
I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.
It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.
Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.
But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).
Agreed and disagreed. It is a terrible precedent for sure. On the other hand, government inaction, usually hiding behind arcane codes, process, and blame circles gets really frustrating. In that world, they'd still be waiting on a court date(if even) when the data center cuts its ribbon.
It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.
I think it's ironic that we have no problem putting DCs next to a prison but god forbid we put them next to a zoo which is the same thing but for animals.
In speaking with non-technical friends who are anti-data centers, I get the impression that they only recently discovered what a data center even was and are oblivious to how much they use data centers in their daily lives outside of AI.
But I don’t fault them even if they’re misinformed. AI is a big power grab by the wealthy and people feel helpless and are acting in the only way they think they can.
My sincere theory is that this is finally the government/politics stepping in to take their cut from the AI revolution. The politicians now have a fee-based strategy where they can literally just stick a fee on any upcoming project(s). Pay up if you ever want your permits to go through and construction to get started.
You don't need a conspiracy theory. All these data centers were going up in rural/near rural areas that voted for this, but then the data centers made everyone else's electric bills go up.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power
> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
They did it because people didn't want a data center next to the zoo. There was a huge backlash against it, and the locals are very happy that they were listened to, I can promise you. No conspiracy theory necessary.
Depends on who you’re talking about. How does the cost benefit analysis work out for someone while lives within a mile of a datacenter, owns no shares in the company, and pays rate fees for their utilities and will have to pay for maintenance for the increased load capacity as well as higher spot prices? If you view America as a cohesive unit I’d agree with you, but I don’t think these people are necessarily acting irrationally if you view their personal circumstance. It’s up to the building company to sweeten the deal and provide an incentive for the locals to add it. Based on the contracts I’ve read from many of these datacenters it seems more like they’re buying the pockets of corrupt politicians and developers in areas with high political inequality while conferring very little benefit to the people who deal with the externalized cost.
I remember when building more fiber could only be good. An awful lot of it sits in the ground lost, never used because it was the wrong type or in the wrong spots, or otherwise pointless waste.
Further, electicity price hikes seems like a bad prospect when inflation is already rampant. If you want a datacenter, offer your house for the space instead.
It's always fun to watch AI zombies wrestle with the idea that sometimes the real humans have different priorities than they do. Usually people are against a lot of those power projects because those very same projects also seem to always raise rates and never deliver the promises of long-term lower rates.
Success doesn’t always look like lower rates, particularly when demand is ever-growing (even when there aren’t new data centers). Success looks like rates not going up faster than inflation, and reliable delivery. I remember well the rolling blackouts in CA in the late 1990s and that sucked. Even the ones in Texas weren’t that long ago.
Also, calling well-intended people with whom you disagree “zombies” is inappropriate. Take it elsewhere.
It blows my mind that (my fellow) Americans are so averse to taxation that they don't even consider that option. Whether you're worried about jobs or faraway tech elites or resource usage....just go straight to the source and use freaking taxes. Blocking is so pointless. All this political will could be a huge opportunity for these locales but instead it's petulant obstructionism.
The Millenium Scholarship program in Nevada paid for tons of kids' education by taxing casinos. It's not perfect but it's channeling economic activity to the people.
What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
VA independent cities aren't that, though. They're what they say on the tin: Cities without a county, they're not a nominal county and city both existing on paper but governed as one
Yes, Nashville has a huge number of council members, and it's much better that way. I moved from there to Seattle, and there's 9 council members (7 districts + 2 city-wide) here so we share a representative with a huge area (six times the people and two and a half times the land) and our local concerns have no voice.
Big Tech has accumulated too many grievances across too many segments of society and made too much money in the process, so let's not act surprised at a backlash. And data centers are remarkably well-suited as a focal point for people to express those accumulated grievances. So I wouldn't look too hard at all the many and varied reasons that data centers are being opposed, but instead at the quickness and ferocity and consistency with which they are being opposed. It reminds of the movement in the US and Canada in the 90's to oppose unfettered globalization - though this already feels larger and more widespread (and less late to the party).
The anti-datacenter movement seems so filled with propaganda (water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc) that it’s hard to believe people aren’t being influenced by some foreign state. You could build a stockyard to slaughter pipeline and get far less pushback while using way more water and having an actual negative impact to all of the surrounding area through the entirety of your operations.
Hats off to whoever is stoking this. It’s witchcraft trials levels of hysteria.
DC's are being used as a proxy for power and wealth disparity. Fix that. Have an actual measurable plan for general prosperity (health care, QoL, housing, you name it) and the data centers won't be a concern
The issues you listed seem intractable in the U.S., and the current NIMBYism towards data centers seems likely to make NIMBYism towards housing even worse - a number of the same arguments that were used against housing are now being used against DCs, but we’re seeing a whole new level of NIMBY tactics being tried out - I expect we will see similar city-wide/county-wide bans on multi-family housing, mass transit, mixed zoning, etc - or use of eminent domain to block housing projects, etc. if this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted or even celebrated against DCs.
Or for your suggestion to “fix healthcare” - how and by whom? The solutions that those on the left push are anathema to 1 of the 2 major parties in the U.S., and the party which currently controls all of the branches of government.
Backlash is just a natural consequence in a democratic society to the absolute accelerationist mindset that AI development has taken since 2022. Actions meet consequences. I mean it wasn't so long ago they were talking about wiping out all white collar work and consigning most the country to the permanent underclass. If you look at how the rest of the economy has been starved of capital to fund all this and how its contributed to inflation and job insecurity, it doesn't really take a foreign actor to spark a massive backlash.
Aesthetics are important. Everyone enjoys looking at a golf course, even non-golfers. Nobody wants to look at a datacenter.
My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar thing for our distribution hub, it’s south of downtown kind of in the outskirts and in an economically struggling area. Same for industrial areas, it’s usually something that’s zoned to a particular area so residential neighborhoods aren’t really affected. It’s not land where the community may benefit more by literally anything else (sometimes even a Walmart is better than a datacenter). I assume that’s where this is all headed, cities need to roll out their long term vision of where datacenters fit into their city, if at all. Until then, it’s all these small battles and the information used by opponents doesn’t really matter. If enough people don’t want it, it should probably go somewhere else. This is not serving any community benefit so I don’t see any reason why it has to exist where the developers want it to.
Expecting rational opposition is actually irrational. They just don’t want it. The why is varied and probably based more on emotion than anything else.
That makes no sense: are they going to use this datacenter exclusively for Nashville people use? We regularly access data from datacenters thousands of kilometers away, and the latency is acceptable. Not even pro-gamers would notice the latency increase if the datacenter moved 10 kilometers further in any direction, which is virtually empty in Nashville.
I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.
We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.
If it’s a colo… yes, it would be primarily local customers. Data centers are not just for consumer B2C services. There’s a lot of stuff that runs in data centers that are both more important and more sensitive to latency or connectivity than video games.
Even for something as simple as a business that needs somewhere to run critical VDI hosts — then yes, they need low latency and somewhere that their techs can physically get to if they need to fix something.
You may also need interconnects to specific physical networks that are only available in certain places. You may need direct connections to partner equipment. This requires physical presence.
Colo space is not something you rent if a VPS is good enough for what you’re doing.
If they zoned it, then the city is saying “you will commute”. It doesn’t have to be unreasonably far away, just less convenient than a Walmart. Most people commute for work anyway, business rent storage/warehouse space in cheaper part of town than their office space, etc. Its hyperlocalness isn’t crucial to its function.
Yeah, I commute 45 minutes to mine. That’s entirely reasonable for my use case. If you’re not doing something like HFT, then being in the same metro area is fine for most purposes.
I was responding to why you wouldn’t want one in a different freakin country
The signal speed in fiber is some 200k km/s. If you go 10 miles outside of a city, you are adding 0.1ms ping, and you will have dramatically fewer pitch forks.
The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.
It’s not necessarily “super high” latency to connect to data centers at a distance. Whether or not it matters depends on the application, and for most consumer applications it isn’t a huge issue. For AI data centers it doesn’t really matter.
That depends highly on the datacenter. While a huge hyperscaler might be noisy, many datacenters are quiet enough that people don’t even know they’re there.
The one I host at, you can’t hear from the end of the parking lot. The coolers aren’t any noisier than the ones on other commercial buildings. These kinds of datacenters are everywhere and most people probably just think they are warehouse or office building.
I'm sure there are data centers that make a noise. And if you're firing up a generator that's a separate issue.
But the noise from computer fans and power supplies is easy to ameliorate and can be a trivial permit requirement.
The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done.
I get the water and power concerns. But (in the right locations) both are solvable. Power can be balanced with power generation (off site) especially solar and wind. Water isn't really "used" it's just necessary as a heat-sink so as long as it's available it can stay available.
Yes, govt should write permits carefully. And there are locations it is not suitable. But opposition to data centers in general is just hype.
Absolutely zero noise from any datacenter comes from the fans or power supplies of the equipment inside of it. The equipment is inside of the building.
> The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done.
Have any of these data centers done this? All the ones I’ve seen haven’t even put up a sound baffling wall. If a data center’s owner has taken steps to ameliorate or completely prevent their negative externalities then opposition to them definitely looks like NIMBYism.
If, however, you’re just saying they _could_ prevent the problems, but then never do, I’m even more inclined to support the people telling them to fuck off.
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo. It's mostly trees, industrial facilities, and a train line.
A normal computer company mixes finely with residential and commercial spots: clean and quiet operation, employees can live closely, etc. A woodworking shop would be noisier. But it has to be normal, not a cryptominer or something like that.
AI datacenters have very real negative effects on the communities they are located in like noise pollution and increased power prices. If you manage to defeat the water reason then people will just start using some other reason.
The biggest externality is the electrical usage. IDK why they keep mentioning water. The AI DCs are driving huge loads to grids, and all ratepayers are being asked to pay for that. IMO if they built a solar + battery farm on grid, paid by AI DCs, there would be no significant hurdles.
I used to think it was just electricity. It could be just electricity, but when they try to divert hundreds of millions of gallons out of water scarce resources like the colorado river[1] in dry, HOT areas where water usage rises -- you can begin to understand why people are irritated. Even if you get promises of using closed systems, corporations are liars.
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc
This sounds like a pretty good argument against golf courses. Not sure why you think this comparison put the water consumption of DCs into perspective, to me it just puts the water consumption of golf courses into perspective.
It's also wrong. The industry is pushing this PR talking point really hard and not enough people are pushing back.
Per acre, data centers absolutely use way more water. But even then its apples to oranges. Golf courses use non-potable/recycled/grey water while data centers require really pure water (drinking water). The demand is also extremely concentrated in one spot instead of being disbursed. And, at least in agricultural land, 30-40% of the water used returns to the water table. With evaporative cooling, all of that water goes into the atmosphere.
A stockyard doesn't consume into the gigawatts of power.
There is not a concerted effort to build thousand upon thousands of stockyards across the globe.
Stockyards wont increase the planets reliance of oil, since green technologies don't scale that fast. Same planet that feeling the effect of climate change quite clearly.
All for close to zero upside for the surrounding community. At least the stockyard would have given you cheaper meat. What are data centers going to give? Discount tokens?
That's why your stockyard does not have the same pushback.
Yeah, those might be some of the other factors. My point is just that actual water use does not explain datacenter pushback well, despite being a predominant argument against them.
of course there are other factors at play here. has anyone tried to hide their motives?
look, i use llms for some work and for some hobby projects, but lets not pretend like the companies behind the llm bubble would ever fight fair. that would be naive to an extreme.
Then they should be even easier to shut down if they're viewed as a wasteful use of water! I think the fact that they are not shut down is evidence that people do not in fact view them as such, or at least not as much people view data centers as a waste of water.
As the xAI debacle in Memphis showed, once construction begins the locality may lose the ability to enforce existing laws around e.g. noise, pollution, etc. that normally serve to contain negative externalities. (This is a side effect of the rule that people who are rich enough are immune from laws.)
Since more precision remedies are off the table, all that's left are gross mechanisms like bans and eminent domain.
Nobody sane would accede to admitting a new community member who is a priori immune to local laws.
Yes, I think bad behaviors do play a part. With any development there has to be some level of trust between the developer and community (where the community are typically represented by local govt.)
Once that trust is eroded it can be difficult to get things built. If you lose trust in the govt the developer won't build. If trust in the developer is lost then permits just stop.
And yes, I think community trust in AI data centers is very low. Perhaps some more creative approaches will be necessary in the future to build up this trust again.
Data centers could be very good neighbors. They could be built in astheticly pleasing ways. They could balance elec consumption with production. They could operate cooling and simply return "warmer water" to source.
Unfortunately under the current cultural circumstances none of this can be taken for granted. Corporations have (very much) lost our trust in the effort to squeeze every last dime of profit out of everything. This is the American way.
Data center water usage varies heavily by design and climate. Most data center providers are not openly publishing water usage, and when they do publish metrics they hide behind derived metrics like WUE. So I don't blame the opponents for any "hysteria".
When we look at data we actually have [0], we can see for example AWS data centers in Oregon consumed 284,000,000 gallons of water in 2024. By their own estimate 100% of that water is typically consumed in the summer months of June, July, August, and Sept. These are also the months that farms use the most irrigation, lawns use the most, etc. Also, keep in mind that Eastern Oregon has ideal weather for evaporative cooling (specifically low humidity). Evap cooling is used for data centers in more humid parts of the country/world and can be significantly less water efficient.
The average Oregon resident uses 80 gallons of water per day, or 29,200 gallons of water annually. And if you calculate it out In 2024, AWS in Oregon used water equivalent to 9726 residents' annual usage. Is that a lot? What if you add all the other data center operators in the area? I don't know. Is they causing unrealistic pressure on aquifiers and the Columbia River watershed? I don't know either. Is the trade off of water consumption for data centers worth it? I'm not really sure how to answer these questions, but I think it starts with data center operators and their utilities being more open about their usage. Today data center operators like to compare their newest DC designs to golf courses and household use and it's not showing the full story.
I mean.... I don't know about where you live but where I am in the North East, electric prices have near doubled in last few years... the people are blaming AI and data centers for this, I'm sure it's not 100% the culprit but the people are looking for someone to blame and some sense that they can control it. Local zoning and municipal ordinance are one of the few ways small folk can assert power.
I put the blame on AI and data centers. The Powers That Be want the AI surveillance state. Funny how they don't care about the Climate Change agenda anymore, now that they have AI.
Companies will always adopt the stances of the ruling party, its part of the core concept of limited liability ownership. Its one of the primary reasons people hate actual capitalism (by which i mean the thing that actually exists and is called capitalism).
Conversely, the pro-data center camp seems so deeply misled about water usage. 90% of current existing data centers are indeed open loop and use evaporative cooling which use SIGNIFICANTLY more water per acre than even farmland or golf courses. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers allow almost all the water to evaporate. And unlike agricultural use which is dispersed over a wide area, data centers draw water from a single pipe, usually drawing from municipal sources. Golf courses usually use recycled, grey, or non-potable water while data centers need really pure water
The water grievances are absolutely valid and so many folks here seem to have drunk the industry koolaid on it.
Closed loop systems aren't exactly green either. That water has to be pumped with anti-corrosives, anti-fungals, non-stick chemicals, etc. Eventually it turns into a toxic sludge that has to be bled about once a month. They also require significantly more electricity than open loop facilities.
Having a closed coolant loop and using evaporative cooling which expends water aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for a datacenter to manage heat rejection by blowing air over a radiator like a car does, but it's much easier and cheaper to cool by evaporating water.
This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.
This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.
A sizable percentage of datacenters use open loop water spray towers, but the alternative, forced air exchange (ie add more giant fans) uses more electricity. It’s fairly complex to quantify which is “better” or “worse” but there exist data centers that evaporate a ton of water and send it elsewhere. (for what it’s worth I agree most of the anti datacenter hype is overblown and driven by specific poorly designed gas turbine powered installations).
...which then comes down again as rain, and in those areas where it's dry enough that evaporative cooling works, the increased humidity might actually be a good thing.
1. A concern is not invalid merely because something else is worse.
2. Leaping to influence by foreign state is non sequitur. What evidence have you observed for that? How do I know you haven't been sent by the corporate tech elites?
3. Focussing on water strawmans the other arguments against data center imho.
I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.
my state power commission just passed a plan to build out 9.5 gigawatts of daily production that will be purely generated by gas turbines [1]. this is at the behest of paid lobbyists for the energy sector and commissioners who, according to open records, have received upwards of six figures from the energy company that is granted a monopoly over our energy here [2]
this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers
if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly
regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much
Perhaps, just maybe, all the price hikes in electricity, city provided subsidies without any public meetings, and shady dealings (NDAs, encouraging city officials to arrest people commenting against the dcs, and so on) make people wary?
Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?
Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?
Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?
The real issue seems to be that local zoning and utility planning never caught up with the scale of modern data centers. If a project can consume huge amounts of power, generate constant noise, affect a neighboring zoo, those costs should be addressed before the land is sold and hundreds of millions are committed.
I wonder if we're heading toward a split where "AI data centers" and traditional cloud infrastructure are treated as completely different categories. Five years ago, a new data center mostly meant more capacity for the internet. Today, many communities seem to assume it means tens of thousands of GPUs, massive power demand, noise, and water usage. AI has clearly changed public perception, but I'm curious how much of the opposition is actually new versus concerns that already existed around land use, noise, and power. For people who work in infrastructure, has the approval process genuinely become harder because of AI, or has AI mainly amplified concerns that were already there?
Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
>the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
Really? You think the American way of life today is comparable to 1821?
You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].
The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].
Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.
>You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk.
If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want to live in Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon's Borg cube you're in for a few rough decades, on both sides of the political spectrum that is.
Who uses Zuckerbergs products? Why is he a billionaire?
He's so evil but the vast majority of Americans can't give up his products?
Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?
The same populace is going to suddenly do what? Inaugurate in some utopia that somehow eliminates the global nature of our economy and way of life? What elections have you been following? The American electorate cares more about inflation than "democracy and self-determination".
Did you actually read Adams speech? It's just overt, 19th century propaganda. Is this the fortune cookie you were speaking of? I'd love for you to actually go through paragraph by paragraph and attempt a robust defense of any of it.
Maybe start with this section:
Fellow-Citizens, it was in the heat of this war of moral elements, which brought one Stuart to the block, and hurled another from his throne, that our forefathers sought refuge from its fury, in the then wilderness of this Western World.
They were willing exiles from a country dearer to them than life.—But they were the exiles of liberty and of conscience, dearer to them even than their country. They came too with Charters from their kings: for even in removing to another hemisphere, they “cast longing, lingering, looks behind,” and were anxiously desirous of retaining ties of connexion with their country, which, in the solemn compact of a charter, they hoped by the corresponding links of allegiance and protection to preserve.
But to their sense of right, the charter was only the ligament between them, their country, and their king. Transported to a new world, they had relations with one another, and relations with the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to which they came, for which no royal charter could provide. The first settlers of the Plymouth colony, at the eve of landing from their ship, therefore, bound themselves together by a written covenant; and, immediately after landing, purchased from the Indian natives the right of settlement upon the soil.
Thus was a social compact formed upon the elementary principles of civil society, in which conquest and servitude had no part. The slough of brutal force was entirely cast off: all was voluntary; all was unbiassed consent; all was the agreement of soul with soul.
>Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?
Yes. The "no one is putting a gun to users' heads" argument is irrelevant when it comes a trillion-dollar company invested in behavioral modeling deliberately driving engagement.
"Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users" (2018)
You get to strip hundreds of millions of people of individual agency on the basis of your stumbling through a handful of headlines, all adhering to the recent trend of reducing human conduct into some neat pathology.
What does this portend for your politics? How to manage this vast polity of addicts? What regime of involuntary commitment will you come up with to force virtue into those that have slipped into this addictive vice?
Maybe while you're at it you can repeal the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. After all, surely this is what John Quincy Adams was after as he expounded upon the nature of American freedom in such flowery terms. The power to moralize over your fellow man, too feeble to resist the likes of fermentation, Facebook or the fruit.
>He's so evil but the vast majority of Americans can't give up his products? Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?
People are perfectly fine with him making products, what they aren't fine with is he (and his peers) starting to think they're kings and trying to overrule the citizens of a state he doesn't live in. If it comes down to a chatbot and the latter they'll chose the latter. The datacenter opposition, of which there are by the way hundreds at this point across the country generally attract 70/30 if not higher majorities.
I'm also not sure what I'm not supposed to support in those paragraphs because, as to your point about inflation, that is currently the consequence of America's ongoing military action in the world, as unpopular as the datacenters, and as the founders were fond to point out the reason for ever more higher levels of taxation, increased state size and lower prosperity. As true today as it was back then.
The modern American standard of life is based on global integration and state power.
If you want to go back to some Garden of Eden fiction regarding Plymouth Rock based on the propagandizing of America's first nepo president you will not find much competition in your pursuit of a life of poverty and subsistence farming. Go log off and enjoy the woods.
Or get serious and propose a plan for continued American economic dominance and standard of life in a world where data centers are demonized, when the economic engine of the future is compute.
What complicity in such evil does a user of his products face, if any? Are most people evil then? If not, what excuse for them can you offer that does not rob them of their human agency? Or do you agree with another commenter that all users of his products are necessarily zombies?
Speaking of such creatures: If someone trolls you on his platform, is that his fault too? What conduct should he control on such a wide platform? What should he not? Is an oversight in said control, in either direction, tantamount to the guilt of conducting the act in question itself?
Is your version of the dead internet theory that Mark Zuckerberg authors all posts on Facebook? Do you have any answers? Or do you offer only scapegoats?
I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them.
Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics.
There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.
The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns.
What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
It doesn't help that at least one datacenter operator and possibly more promised municipalities in Arizona that they wouldn't use their water and then secretly used millions of gallons. This in the middle of water shortages.
I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here, but 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year. It's really not that much water.
> The water thing is, I think, baloney
It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places.
What exactly are you saying is baloney?
The water sediment thing had nothing to do with the building being a data center I think? Any form of construction would interfere with people drinking well water next to it
Isn't that enough to rethink the construction - it takes a while to build a data center, and I would not be happy that I have to suffer with shitty water because a data center is being built for years.
What I mean is that it’s got nothing to do with data centers. Saying “data centers pollute water” is misleading, in these situations
1) we’re talking about people pulling unfiltered untreated well water
2) any building would have had exactly the same effect.
I am not talking about sediment, or anything construction-related.
This is normal operations being done irresponsibly:
1.) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/meta-datacen...
2.) https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/saline-township-residen...
Did you read the guardian article? It’s a bit of a nothing-burger, are we really going to have a national panic based on that?
> flushed bacteria-contaminated water into public sewers
I do that every morning
> SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal.
To put a finer and much-angrier point on this:
1. Traditionally, Americans have been protected from certain kinds of harm by certain federal laws. Where present, these laws take priority (supremacy clause) over state laws. (i.e. The Clean Air Act.)
2. Due to certain people and one party controlling the federal government today, American communities are no longer getting justice under those laws. This is because the facility-owners (i.e. xAI and Elon Musk) are capable of bribing their way into flouting the law. (i.e. No enforcement from EPA, DoJ claims the facility needs a "national security" exception to pollute.)
3. Since communities are robbed of protection from federal laws, they must instead try to use state/local laws.
4. Due the responsibility-areas of federal-vs-state laws, this often means preventing the facility from being built at all, as opposed to limiting what it does when operating.
____
TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal compromise route, so they're partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures that actually work.
>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate
The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)
The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape.
Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time.
Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity.
These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
> These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all.
Why not batteries?
> These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all.
They could be training a model or two for months.
But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box.
I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
They're all drain.
This is the opposite of the truth. For instance:
https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
How is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions?
The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates.
50% off energy taxes.
Reduced property taxes.
I could go on.
https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo...
Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption?
Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc.
A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less.
It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
No, it's exactly the truth:
https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a...
The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
I'd think that the claim
>Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to?
Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing.
Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room?
That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster.
Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts.
Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall.
But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes.
If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method.
Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
> Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you.
Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR.
> Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby
I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere.
Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace.
> because someone failed to do PR
They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion.
I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices.
The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer.
What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve?
If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them?
I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…)
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4].
The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.)
Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem.
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s
[3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
[4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta...
I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs.
The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things.
Nah, I back the Abundance movement and have voted for building new housing complexes in my town against groups who claimed it would ruin the character of our town to have a 60 acre plot near an old industrial center turned into neighborhoods.
Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building.
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.
This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.
Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.
Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount.
Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate.
(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)
The data center might be more attractive but the office building provides more jobs and resources to the local community. You skipped that point in your reply. Even if most of the people working in the office building aren't from the area, those people are getting food and other services from local businesses. All that money goes to the local community and supports local businesses.
Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right?
Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right?
I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways
First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.
> Most of the lots are empty.
Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't?
> Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc?
I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice!
But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right?
Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction?
(in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?)
(Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better)
No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of it. CHI1 is ringed by a single two-sided line of spots. Every big box retailer is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt larger than CHI1 itself.
You'd take a featureless, opaque warehouse over a structure with windows and architecture that was intended to stand out? The asphalt doesn't have to be an eyesore if planned well, either. Copious vegetation woven throughout, painted teal or with murals instead of black, a policy of "after the following hours, locals are allowed to play roller-hockey and tennis here.", host regular farmer's markets, etc.
I'd love to see a Google Maps picture of a large, attractive parking lot.
Wait are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers
Do you think a community is your house
The office buildings next to the CyrusOne data centers in the western suburbs are not filled with people from Aurora. They're filled with commuters.
Do they not eat lunch? Or do any local shopping?
The literal foot traffic of office workers was a major reason brought up by cities trying to force companies to RTO post pandemic.
That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? The data centers? Also what does the specific building or set of buildings you hate in one town have to do with the concept of office buildings
> That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work?
Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople.
These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office.
> These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day
While it is a shame that tptacek has to see “commuters“ going both ways it is good to know that the people of Aurora have this beautiful park
https://www.cyrusone.com/data-centers/north-america/aurora-i...
I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.
>are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers
>Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
Since neither are data centers, which aren’t filled with workers, you could’ve just said “yeah”
“Office buildings bring less to communities than data centers because of all the people that work in them” lmao
> nobody moralizes office buildings
I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?
Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.
I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.
Office buildings presumably are filled with bodies who get paid, who will spend some amount of money in the local economy.
I'm not sure data centers could make the same argument.
The agents will leave the data center and buy stuff from the local economy, didn’t you hear that?
Nobody? I do, and I've seen plenty others.
People have been talking about these issues for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Small_Urban...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Marohn
https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Delahanty
> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community
This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit.
I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods.
Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue.
> generate almost nothing for the local community
HN forgets how edge computing or even Cloudflare works.
> Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants
Ground floor retail in every datacenter.
More nail salons, a Halloween store open for two months out of the year, and boutique bakeries (that will be out of business in 6 months).
>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise
For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
You might want to let the angry townspeople know because they're already passing symbolic measures and convincing the abuelas they're going to drain Lake Michigan to power these things:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2026/07/27/hawthorne-race-cours...
Isn't Chicago filled with rail yards full of humming diesel locomotives? I couldn't think of a bigger eyesore. You can't plant trees in a rail yard.
The present anti-datacenter hysteria reeks of the "5G mind control cancer machines" of a few years ago.
> You can't plant trees in a rail yard.
Why not?
Seen what a tree can do to a sidewalk?
You can step over or walk around cracked and buckled concrete.
Trains don’t appreciate having their rail ballast disturbed.
I think trains are ok with trees. I checked satellite view - there are a lot of rail tracks in Chicago going directly along tree lines. The rail yards indeed look like tracks on concrete with nothing else, but when I look at German ones - there are trees and bushes.
The trains have a bad habit of hitting them.
because of... rails
A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.
This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers.
Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know?
> But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls
You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7.
Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.
No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything.
Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
We've "imported" this concern to the UK too, largely driven by the same issues seemingly whipped up by US lack of regulation much more than local examples (that's not to say there have been no cases of bad buildouts here).
Many of the people now extremely opposed to data centres seem to believe the UK didn't have any data centres recently, never mind that you can pass by data centres in e.g. London Docklands and mistake it for an office building. In some cases they are in a subset of floors of office buildings.
I'm all for regulating them so they need to account for externalities, but the blind opposition to them is frustrating, not least because it means there's no pressure to deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects.
> deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects
Two counterpoints:
- the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
- for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
> the user instead of in big centralized facilities
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
That's working under the (imo wrong) assumption that LLMs are what we need/want. First, because pushing toward the user can happen as shared hosting in your municipality and doesn't have to be in every home. Second, because if you take slop, adtech, and surveillance out of the equation, the material impact is several orders of magnitude less than what's being built today. Or for what it's worth, several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
It’s going to the high frontier. Orbital/lunar. It’s too important not to harden.
This is an investor scam and not a real proposal.
> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
As modern datacenters go, 69,000 sq ft for a whole facility is REALLY small. Only some portion of that 69k is going to be actual conditioned space once you subtract all the ancillary services, things like security office, staging area, bathrooms, electrical breaker panel rooms, etc. It's almost like boutique/niche sized compared to the things that are going up in Texas, Indiana, a few other places. I know people building hyperscale size stuff that would almost call 69k sq ft hobby sized.
The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
> That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana
You can't without making an effort to reduce your dependence on it. The most anti DC people I see are chronically online blasting their shit all over social media. Typically influencers, who make a living using said DCs, all day long. Social media directly supports what they are against. There are other ways to spread your message and when they choose the one method that directly goes against the message they are trying to put out, I'm not going to take them seriously, and will also assume they don't know what they're talking about.
These new datacenters aren’t for powering social media. All this extra capacity is for slop generators actively making the world worse.
> You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system.
I see very little advocating for change and a whole lot of knee-jerk reactions to shut it down.
The data center protests near me tried to complain about noise as one of their points, even though the DC was in the middle of nowhere
I like having my garbage picked up at the curb, but I wouldn't want to live downwind from a landfill.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
I think that’s how DCs mark an exponential growth in NIMBYism and its acceptance - we’re already seeing city-wide, county-wide, even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density. If this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted, I expect to see similar broader bans against multi-family housing, mass-transit, etc.
Based on what? Slippery slope fallacy? There are real reasons why people don’t want their community to have a DC, which are wildly different than the entitled NIMBYism that isn’t against multi-family housing and mass transit.
Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
> which are wildly different
Many of the same reasons used against dense housing, mass transit, and solar/wind turbines are used against DCs -
such as claims:
* That it would be too much for the existing grid to handle
* That it would be too much for existing other utilities to handle
* That it would be too close to x other thing (zoo, etc)
* Some say it won't be visually appealing
* That it would change the nature of the existing area
* That there isn't enough groundwater
* etc.
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Wouldn't the complaints then be that a DC there would spoil the area's natural beauty (and would be too much for the electric grid there, etc)? Or if the DC were located similarly to how this one is, there would be the same complaints as OP case - see the photo at the very top of the OP article - it shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
>> even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
1. You say you would change your mind in that particular place, but are you arguing that others wouldn't NIMBY against Atherton if one were proposed there? Everyone has different ideas about where they believe should be NIMBYd, including because people have different 'backyards'? And I presume your 'backyard' is tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles from the OP DC location?
2. With state-level bans already existing in states where much of the state is very low-density, the evidence seems to show the opposite of your claim that if a very low-density area were picked then it wouldn't face a ban.
"You criticize society, yet you participate in it. How curious."
Oh come on. 95% of new data centers are obviously for LLMs not communications
> There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).
I think this general situation has been on peoples' minds since Erin Bronkovich. Gosh that movie came out 26 years ago.
> this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over
I wonder if these "classic projects" have been morphing into jet engine projects as energy use vs energy available have changed.
personally datacenters have affected you and me: ssds, hard disks and memory are super expensive; electricity costs have gone up
Maybe, but "this would probably have been fine five years ago" is not a very reassuring standard. The physical impact matters more than whether the racks are running email servers or training models.
A traditional colo DC isn't running super power dense GPUs and doesn't use water cooling. These exist in whatever city you live in and no one knows where they are because there is no impact. They are completely different beasts.
Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?
>Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space
Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws. I would personally vote against polticians who enacted those kinds of regulations; and if they passed anyway I would attempt to mine and use cryptocurrency in ways that circumvented the regulations banning me from doing so.
>> The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws.
Thats exactly correct. The killer app for crypto is criminal enterprise. Yes there are other niches, but nothing that would sustain the industry.
Passing a regulation regarding mining would be difficult to enforce. It's impossible to know what a GPU inside the data center is doing.
At this point the industry is legit, even promoted by individuals in govt (who overtly sell access (cough bribe) using it. So no, you don't need to worry, there's no risk of regulations like this anywhere soon.
Virtualization uses standard rack mount servers, crypto does not. The machinery they use are completely different.
If anyone is curious, from the photograph in the article, I have geolocated the existing business park property here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kYyHuEWcAZkrypWa7
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
I work in commercial real and even I'm going to go NIMBY mode on this lol. This property shares a large boundary to the zoo and I have a very hard time believing you won't cause an impact (noise pollution eg) to the animals next door.
Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.
IMO noise pollution is the easiest one to solve: just put all the AC fans on the far side of the datacenter. If not enough, surround with noise absorbing panels. If not enough, just get a different fan design, more coolers, and run them at half speed. They can even afford Noctua :)
I bet nearby rail yard produces way more loud noises.
Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.
This is more a harbinger of what is about to happen all over the country. So the specifics matter less than it marking the political ascendancy of the backlash to AI / data centers / big tech / billionaires...
One of the guys leading the effort is active on threads (probably twitter too). He has no interest in negotiating. He is gloating over his win hardcore and has very absolutist views when it comes to datacenters
What I think is nice is that the political parties opposed to data center development are actually taking concrete steps, exercising specific powers, to advance their goals.
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
If the city thinks data centers are incompatible with certain areas, it should encode that through zoning, permitting, utility pricing, noise limits, etc.
We have those but data centers keep skirting them. Data center developers often classify their properties as "light industrial" or "warehouse" to bypass regulation. These lobbyists are also big enough to push state legislation that strips local towns and counties of land-use authority.
Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound
Sounds like a good opportunity to update the rules on noise pollution then.
I feel like that is besides the point. I think the fact that ended up this way is an illustration how hardened the public has become. There's no niceties, procedure. The public has been pushed well past that point. This is not a negotiation.
Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.
No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.
It feels like this is the first time I've seen the political system move in tune with the public mood in regards to AI and this is public anger finding expression in public policy.
> will over the individuals desire.
If you believe corporations are people.
Even billionaires really don't operate as individuals, they are a monster that we've let grow to have unchecked power across the entire federal government.
(note, I may be agreeing with what you're saying I just don't agree with the framing of the "individual") Most of the pushback belongs against the entities that are more powerful than even the federal government at times.)
I live in Nashville. This story is all over the place in general. People assume all the things like it will make their rates go up, etc.
I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.
It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.
Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.
But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).
Agreed and disagreed. It is a terrible precedent for sure. On the other hand, government inaction, usually hiding behind arcane codes, process, and blame circles gets really frustrating. In that world, they'd still be waiting on a court date(if even) when the data center cuts its ribbon.
It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.
This sounds like one of those cases where the opposition may be right about the project and still wrong about the mechanism
I think it's ironic that we have no problem putting DCs next to a prison but god forbid we put them next to a zoo which is the same thing but for animals.
Same city:
>The 60,000-seat stadium is projected to cost $2.1 billion, including $1.26 billion of public money—the largest stadium subsidy in U.S. history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Stadium_(2027)
Amazing that the new stadium has less capacity too
This doesn't sound like the proper use of eminent domain to me.
In speaking with non-technical friends who are anti-data centers, I get the impression that they only recently discovered what a data center even was and are oblivious to how much they use data centers in their daily lives outside of AI.
But I don’t fault them even if they’re misinformed. AI is a big power grab by the wealthy and people feel helpless and are acting in the only way they think they can.
Regardless of a datacenter being for AI or not, NIMBY applies to everyone. I look forward to these totally probable datacenters in space.
NIMBYs are the reason San Francisco doesn't have massive freeways splitting through the center of it. Sometimes NIMBYs get things right
Didn't the Loma Prieta earthquake do that?
The irony of a zoo concerned about animal welfare...
My sincere theory is that this is finally the government/politics stepping in to take their cut from the AI revolution. The politicians now have a fee-based strategy where they can literally just stick a fee on any upcoming project(s). Pay up if you ever want your permits to go through and construction to get started.
It is probably not that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 posted yesterday explains it well.
You don't need a conspiracy theory. All these data centers were going up in rural/near rural areas that voted for this, but then the data centers made everyone else's electric bills go up.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power
> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
They did it because people didn't want a data center next to the zoo. There was a huge backlash against it, and the locals are very happy that they were listened to, I can promise you. No conspiracy theory necessary.
The value prop for the crazy sounding idea of putting GPUs into orbit.
beginning of the end of the American empire. Building data centres can only be good.
"can only be good" - you can't imagine ways in which they at least could be bad?
Depends on who you’re talking about. How does the cost benefit analysis work out for someone while lives within a mile of a datacenter, owns no shares in the company, and pays rate fees for their utilities and will have to pay for maintenance for the increased load capacity as well as higher spot prices? If you view America as a cohesive unit I’d agree with you, but I don’t think these people are necessarily acting irrationally if you view their personal circumstance. It’s up to the building company to sweeten the deal and provide an incentive for the locals to add it. Based on the contracts I’ve read from many of these datacenters it seems more like they’re buying the pockets of corrupt politicians and developers in areas with high political inequality while conferring very little benefit to the people who deal with the externalized cost.
I take it that you'll be pleased when a data center is proposed to be built behind your house then yes?
I remember when building more fiber could only be good. An awful lot of it sits in the ground lost, never used because it was the wrong type or in the wrong spots, or otherwise pointless waste.
Further, electicity price hikes seems like a bad prospect when inflation is already rampant. If you want a datacenter, offer your house for the space instead.
We can generate more electricity, but NIMBY types don't want to approve projects that would add capacity, either.
It's always fun to watch AI zombies wrestle with the idea that sometimes the real humans have different priorities than they do. Usually people are against a lot of those power projects because those very same projects also seem to always raise rates and never deliver the promises of long-term lower rates.
Success doesn’t always look like lower rates, particularly when demand is ever-growing (even when there aren’t new data centers). Success looks like rates not going up faster than inflation, and reliable delivery. I remember well the rolling blackouts in CA in the late 1990s and that sucked. Even the ones in Texas weren’t that long ago.
Also, calling well-intended people with whom you disagree “zombies” is inappropriate. Take it elsewhere.
beginning? the end of empire became obvious with the election of trump, but probably started with missteps in the 80s
Incipient better? Or are we in progress?
Good for the construction companies, the billion dollar corporations, and the whole 4 people needed to run each one.
Not once instance of these datacenters has proven to be beneficial for the communities and economies they're located in.
It blows my mind that (my fellow) Americans are so averse to taxation that they don't even consider that option. Whether you're worried about jobs or faraway tech elites or resource usage....just go straight to the source and use freaking taxes. Blocking is so pointless. All this political will could be a huge opportunity for these locales but instead it's petulant obstructionism.
The Millenium Scholarship program in Nevada paid for tons of kids' education by taxing casinos. It's not perfect but it's channeling economic activity to the people.
Why would the data center operators pay extra taxes to your city when they can just build them somewhere else that gives them a tax break instead?
What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
https://www.nashville.gov/departments/council
This isn't true?
San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee
I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
> [T]he nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
>this isn't a city or a county
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
Coming from the state of Virginia, I might say that they're a perfectly standard way to govern.
VA independent cities aren't that, though. They're what they say on the tin: Cities without a county, they're not a nominal county and city both existing on paper but governed as one
Yes, Nashville has a huge number of council members, and it's much better that way. I moved from there to Seattle, and there's 9 council members (7 districts + 2 city-wide) here so we share a representative with a huge area (six times the people and two and a half times the land) and our local concerns have no voice.
Big Tech has accumulated too many grievances across too many segments of society and made too much money in the process, so let's not act surprised at a backlash. And data centers are remarkably well-suited as a focal point for people to express those accumulated grievances. So I wouldn't look too hard at all the many and varied reasons that data centers are being opposed, but instead at the quickness and ferocity and consistency with which they are being opposed. It reminds of the movement in the US and Canada in the 90's to oppose unfettered globalization - though this already feels larger and more widespread (and less late to the party).
LOL but they'll tear up the city for a stadium.
The anti-datacenter movement seems so filled with propaganda (water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc) that it’s hard to believe people aren’t being influenced by some foreign state. You could build a stockyard to slaughter pipeline and get far less pushback while using way more water and having an actual negative impact to all of the surrounding area through the entirety of your operations.
Hats off to whoever is stoking this. It’s witchcraft trials levels of hysteria.
DC's are being used as a proxy for power and wealth disparity. Fix that. Have an actual measurable plan for general prosperity (health care, QoL, housing, you name it) and the data centers won't be a concern
The issues you listed seem intractable in the U.S., and the current NIMBYism towards data centers seems likely to make NIMBYism towards housing even worse - a number of the same arguments that were used against housing are now being used against DCs, but we’re seeing a whole new level of NIMBY tactics being tried out - I expect we will see similar city-wide/county-wide bans on multi-family housing, mass transit, mixed zoning, etc - or use of eminent domain to block housing projects, etc. if this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted or even celebrated against DCs.
Or for your suggestion to “fix healthcare” - how and by whom? The solutions that those on the left push are anathema to 1 of the 2 major parties in the U.S., and the party which currently controls all of the branches of government.
Pretty much, disrupting datacenter builds is one of the few ways people can fight back against evil tech billionaires.
Backlash is just a natural consequence in a democratic society to the absolute accelerationist mindset that AI development has taken since 2022. Actions meet consequences. I mean it wasn't so long ago they were talking about wiping out all white collar work and consigning most the country to the permanent underclass. If you look at how the rest of the economy has been starved of capital to fund all this and how its contributed to inflation and job insecurity, it doesn't really take a foreign actor to spark a massive backlash.
Aesthetics are important. Everyone enjoys looking at a golf course, even non-golfers. Nobody wants to look at a datacenter.
My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar thing for our distribution hub, it’s south of downtown kind of in the outskirts and in an economically struggling area. Same for industrial areas, it’s usually something that’s zoned to a particular area so residential neighborhoods aren’t really affected. It’s not land where the community may benefit more by literally anything else (sometimes even a Walmart is better than a datacenter). I assume that’s where this is all headed, cities need to roll out their long term vision of where datacenters fit into their city, if at all. Until then, it’s all these small battles and the information used by opponents doesn’t really matter. If enough people don’t want it, it should probably go somewhere else. This is not serving any community benefit so I don’t see any reason why it has to exist where the developers want it to.
Expecting rational opposition is actually irrational. They just don’t want it. The why is varied and probably based more on emotion than anything else.
> what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with?
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
That makes no sense: are they going to use this datacenter exclusively for Nashville people use? We regularly access data from datacenters thousands of kilometers away, and the latency is acceptable. Not even pro-gamers would notice the latency increase if the datacenter moved 10 kilometers further in any direction, which is virtually empty in Nashville.
I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.
We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.
If it’s a colo… yes, it would be primarily local customers. Data centers are not just for consumer B2C services. There’s a lot of stuff that runs in data centers that are both more important and more sensitive to latency or connectivity than video games.
Even for something as simple as a business that needs somewhere to run critical VDI hosts — then yes, they need low latency and somewhere that their techs can physically get to if they need to fix something.
You may also need interconnects to specific physical networks that are only available in certain places. You may need direct connections to partner equipment. This requires physical presence.
Colo space is not something you rent if a VPS is good enough for what you’re doing.
If they zoned it, then the city is saying “you will commute”. It doesn’t have to be unreasonably far away, just less convenient than a Walmart. Most people commute for work anyway, business rent storage/warehouse space in cheaper part of town than their office space, etc. Its hyperlocalness isn’t crucial to its function.
Yeah, I commute 45 minutes to mine. That’s entirely reasonable for my use case. If you’re not doing something like HFT, then being in the same metro area is fine for most purposes.
I was responding to why you wouldn’t want one in a different freakin country
Right? How do people not understand this? Have fun with your super-high latency when the DCs leave your city.
The signal speed in fiber is some 200k km/s. If you go 10 miles outside of a city, you are adding 0.1ms ping, and you will have dramatically fewer pitch forks.
The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.
But if it’s a colo it’s unlikely to have many LLMs running there. The big AI datacenters are mostly purpose built.
Is this DC even for LLMs? I've not seen any sign of that.
Considering that the initial build out was only 10MW, it seems unlikely that was the primary usecase.
It’s not necessarily “super high” latency to connect to data centers at a distance. Whether or not it matters depends on the application, and for most consumer applications it isn’t a huge issue. For AI data centers it doesn’t really matter.
Try living next to a constant 80-100 dB hum 24x7. You’d not be complaining about people being irrational.
That depends highly on the datacenter. While a huge hyperscaler might be noisy, many datacenters are quiet enough that people don’t even know they’re there.
The one I host at, you can’t hear from the end of the parking lot. The coolers aren’t any noisier than the ones on other commercial buildings. These kinds of datacenters are everywhere and most people probably just think they are warehouse or office building.
I'm sure there are data centers that make a noise. And if you're firing up a generator that's a separate issue.
But the noise from computer fans and power supplies is easy to ameliorate and can be a trivial permit requirement.
The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done.
I get the water and power concerns. But (in the right locations) both are solvable. Power can be balanced with power generation (off site) especially solar and wind. Water isn't really "used" it's just necessary as a heat-sink so as long as it's available it can stay available.
Yes, govt should write permits carefully. And there are locations it is not suitable. But opposition to data centers in general is just hype.
Absolutely zero noise from any datacenter comes from the fans or power supplies of the equipment inside of it. The equipment is inside of the building.
Datacenter noise comes from the chiller units.
> The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done.
Have any of these data centers done this? All the ones I’ve seen haven’t even put up a sound baffling wall. If a data center’s owner has taken steps to ameliorate or completely prevent their negative externalities then opposition to them definitely looks like NIMBYism.
If, however, you’re just saying they _could_ prevent the problems, but then never do, I’m even more inclined to support the people telling them to fuck off.
I do not enjoy looking at a golf course. (A minigolf course is a different kettle of fish.. of course.)
> placing them in populated areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo. It's mostly trees, industrial facilities, and a train line.
A normal computer company mixes finely with residential and commercial spots: clean and quiet operation, employees can live closely, etc. A woodworking shop would be noisier. But it has to be normal, not a cryptominer or something like that.
https://amp.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/...
AI datacenters have very real negative effects on the communities they are located in like noise pollution and increased power prices. If you manage to defeat the water reason then people will just start using some other reason.
The biggest externality is the electrical usage. IDK why they keep mentioning water. The AI DCs are driving huge loads to grids, and all ratepayers are being asked to pay for that. IMO if they built a solar + battery farm on grid, paid by AI DCs, there would be no significant hurdles.
I used to think it was just electricity. It could be just electricity, but when they try to divert hundreds of millions of gallons out of water scarce resources like the colorado river[1] in dry, HOT areas where water usage rises -- you can begin to understand why people are irritated. Even if you get promises of using closed systems, corporations are liars.
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
[1] - https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/data-center-develop...
This is about a DC in Nashville -- it is on the Cumberland river.
> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc
This sounds like a pretty good argument against golf courses. Not sure why you think this comparison put the water consumption of DCs into perspective, to me it just puts the water consumption of golf courses into perspective.
It's also wrong. The industry is pushing this PR talking point really hard and not enough people are pushing back.
Per acre, data centers absolutely use way more water. But even then its apples to oranges. Golf courses use non-potable/recycled/grey water while data centers require really pure water (drinking water). The demand is also extremely concentrated in one spot instead of being disbursed. And, at least in agricultural land, 30-40% of the water used returns to the water table. With evaporative cooling, all of that water goes into the atmosphere.
Yes, we should be looking into the wasteful water use in golf courses too.
A stockyard doesn't consume into the gigawatts of power.
There is not a concerted effort to build thousand upon thousands of stockyards across the globe.
Stockyards wont increase the planets reliance of oil, since green technologies don't scale that fast. Same planet that feeling the effect of climate change quite clearly.
All for close to zero upside for the surrounding community. At least the stockyard would have given you cheaper meat. What are data centers going to give? Discount tokens?
That's why your stockyard does not have the same pushback.
> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc
Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.
Then why is no one eminent domaining golf courses? Clearly there are other factors at play here
Well nobody is eminent domaining existing data centers, are they?
Try to build as many new golf courses as there are new data centers going up and you might get a similar reaction...
Golf courses do not emit noise, they are relatively nice looking and they are not a threat for people to be unemployed.
Yeah, those might be some of the other factors. My point is just that actual water use does not explain datacenter pushback well, despite being a predominant argument against them.
of course there are other factors at play here. has anyone tried to hide their motives?
look, i use llms for some work and for some hobby projects, but lets not pretend like the companies behind the llm bubble would ever fight fair. that would be naive to an extreme.
A lot of golf courses are owned by cities or other public entities.
Then they should be even easier to shut down if they're viewed as a wasteful use of water! I think the fact that they are not shut down is evidence that people do not in fact view them as such, or at least not as much people view data centers as a waste of water.
As the xAI debacle in Memphis showed, once construction begins the locality may lose the ability to enforce existing laws around e.g. noise, pollution, etc. that normally serve to contain negative externalities. (This is a side effect of the rule that people who are rich enough are immune from laws.)
Since more precision remedies are off the table, all that's left are gross mechanisms like bans and eminent domain.
Nobody sane would accede to admitting a new community member who is a priori immune to local laws.
Yes, I think bad behaviors do play a part. With any development there has to be some level of trust between the developer and community (where the community are typically represented by local govt.)
Once that trust is eroded it can be difficult to get things built. If you lose trust in the govt the developer won't build. If trust in the developer is lost then permits just stop.
And yes, I think community trust in AI data centers is very low. Perhaps some more creative approaches will be necessary in the future to build up this trust again.
Data centers could be very good neighbors. They could be built in astheticly pleasing ways. They could balance elec consumption with production. They could operate cooling and simply return "warmer water" to source.
Unfortunately under the current cultural circumstances none of this can be taken for granted. Corporations have (very much) lost our trust in the effort to squeeze every last dime of profit out of everything. This is the American way.
Data center water usage varies heavily by design and climate. Most data center providers are not openly publishing water usage, and when they do publish metrics they hide behind derived metrics like WUE. So I don't blame the opponents for any "hysteria".
When we look at data we actually have [0], we can see for example AWS data centers in Oregon consumed 284,000,000 gallons of water in 2024. By their own estimate 100% of that water is typically consumed in the summer months of June, July, August, and Sept. These are also the months that farms use the most irrigation, lawns use the most, etc. Also, keep in mind that Eastern Oregon has ideal weather for evaporative cooling (specifically low humidity). Evap cooling is used for data centers in more humid parts of the country/world and can be significantly less water efficient.
The average Oregon resident uses 80 gallons of water per day, or 29,200 gallons of water annually. And if you calculate it out In 2024, AWS in Oregon used water equivalent to 9726 residents' annual usage. Is that a lot? What if you add all the other data center operators in the area? I don't know. Is they causing unrealistic pressure on aquifiers and the Columbia River watershed? I don't know either. Is the trade off of water consumption for data centers worth it? I'm not really sure how to answer these questions, but I think it starts with data center operators and their utilities being more open about their usage. Today data center operators like to compare their newest DC designs to golf courses and household use and it's not showing the full story.
[0] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/get-involved/Documents/2026-03...
I mean.... I don't know about where you live but where I am in the North East, electric prices have near doubled in last few years... the people are blaming AI and data centers for this, I'm sure it's not 100% the culprit but the people are looking for someone to blame and some sense that they can control it. Local zoning and municipal ordinance are one of the few ways small folk can assert power.
I put the blame on AI and data centers. The Powers That Be want the AI surveillance state. Funny how they don't care about the Climate Change agenda anymore, now that they have AI.
Companies will always adopt the stances of the ruling party, its part of the core concept of limited liability ownership. Its one of the primary reasons people hate actual capitalism (by which i mean the thing that actually exists and is called capitalism).
Conversely, the pro-data center camp seems so deeply misled about water usage. 90% of current existing data centers are indeed open loop and use evaporative cooling which use SIGNIFICANTLY more water per acre than even farmland or golf courses. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers allow almost all the water to evaporate. And unlike agricultural use which is dispersed over a wide area, data centers draw water from a single pipe, usually drawing from municipal sources. Golf courses usually use recycled, grey, or non-potable water while data centers need really pure water
The water grievances are absolutely valid and so many folks here seem to have drunk the industry koolaid on it.
Closed loop systems aren't exactly green either. That water has to be pumped with anti-corrosives, anti-fungals, non-stick chemicals, etc. Eventually it turns into a toxic sludge that has to be bled about once a month. They also require significantly more electricity than open loop facilities.
The public discourse for any sufficiently technical topic sounds misinformed to anyone who understands the topic well.
However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.
Perhaps you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 on here yesterday?
Please do provide your sources on the golf course stat you quoted.
There is basically zero truth about the water use propaganda. Liquid cooling is closed-cycle, just like in a car.
Having a closed coolant loop and using evaporative cooling which expends water aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for a datacenter to manage heat rejection by blowing air over a radiator like a car does, but it's much easier and cheaper to cool by evaporating water.
This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.
This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.
[1] https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-to-resume-construction-on-wa...
A sizable percentage of datacenters use open loop water spray towers, but the alternative, forced air exchange (ie add more giant fans) uses more electricity. It’s fairly complex to quantify which is “better” or “worse” but there exist data centers that evaporate a ton of water and send it elsewhere. (for what it’s worth I agree most of the anti datacenter hype is overblown and driven by specific poorly designed gas turbine powered installations).
> driven by specific poorly designed gas turbine powered installations
*increasingly nonspecific. See [1] for example
[1] https://floodlightnews.org/ai-data-centers-texas-pollution-l...
I thought this too. Apparently there’s open cooling systems as well that are more efficient
Yes. Evaporative cooling towers. I suppose in those cases nearly all the water used goes to atmosphere.
...which then comes down again as rain, and in those areas where it's dry enough that evaporative cooling works, the increased humidity might actually be a good thing.
In areas it's dry enough it is just leaving that watershed. It will be carried hundreds and thousands of miles away.
Decades ago, there was a plan to equalise the water supply throughout the country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
Now China is beating us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South–North_Water_Transfer_Pro...
Oh good, I'm glad China is beating us in the path to stupidity. These types of projects are the dumbest things we ever did here. Classic!
Nothing dumber than reallocating resources thouands of miles away from where they should be.
The water use comes from evaporative cooling, not liquid cooling.
Liquid cooling pulls heat away from the chips. Evaporative cooling takes it out of the building.
There are alternatives, but evaporative cooling is very energy efficient.
Is this actually true?
Aren’t there real instances of metas data centers causing havoc for nearby residents? Light/boise pollution, contaminated water are real things
1. A concern is not invalid merely because something else is worse. 2. Leaping to influence by foreign state is non sequitur. What evidence have you observed for that? How do I know you haven't been sent by the corporate tech elites? 3. Focussing on water strawmans the other arguments against data center imho.
I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.
With patience, love and a bit of humor. X
I don't understand the water usage fears. I'm much more concerned with electricity usage.
my state power commission just passed a plan to build out 9.5 gigawatts of daily production that will be purely generated by gas turbines [1]. this is at the behest of paid lobbyists for the energy sector and commissioners who, according to open records, have received upwards of six figures from the energy company that is granted a monopoly over our energy here [2]
this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers
if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly
regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much
[1](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/georgia-power...) [2](https://energyandpolicy.org/georgia-psc-incumbents-majority-...) [3](https://rmi.org/resources/you-might-be-paying-for-a-worthles...)
Nonsensical issues go viral all the time without any conspiracy behind them
Perhaps, just maybe, all the price hikes in electricity, city provided subsidies without any public meetings, and shady dealings (NDAs, encouraging city officials to arrest people commenting against the dcs, and so on) make people wary?
Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?
Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?
Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?
This is an incredible amount of hysteria over a tiny data center. Genuine pizzagate levels of epistemics here.
Those would be great epistemics
That's not as great example as you think it is.
The real issue seems to be that local zoning and utility planning never caught up with the scale of modern data centers. If a project can consume huge amounts of power, generate constant noise, affect a neighboring zoo, those costs should be addressed before the land is sold and hundreds of millions are committed.
I wonder if we're heading toward a split where "AI data centers" and traditional cloud infrastructure are treated as completely different categories. Five years ago, a new data center mostly meant more capacity for the internet. Today, many communities seem to assume it means tens of thousands of GPUs, massive power demand, noise, and water usage. AI has clearly changed public perception, but I'm curious how much of the opposition is actually new versus concerns that already existed around land use, noise, and power. For people who work in infrastructure, has the approval process genuinely become harder because of AI, or has AI mainly amplified concerns that were already there?
Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
It's a religious belief that we're going to invent a machine god and our machine god will fight china's machine god.
I don't think OP mentioned a machine god?
One that just happens to be very convenient for the machine-god peddling billionaires.
>the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
Really? You think the American way of life today is comparable to 1821?
You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].
The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].
Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_dynasty 2. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...
>You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk.
If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want to live in Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon's Borg cube you're in for a few rough decades, on both sides of the political spectrum that is.
Who uses Zuckerbergs products? Why is he a billionaire?
He's so evil but the vast majority of Americans can't give up his products?
Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?
The same populace is going to suddenly do what? Inaugurate in some utopia that somehow eliminates the global nature of our economy and way of life? What elections have you been following? The American electorate cares more about inflation than "democracy and self-determination".
Did you actually read Adams speech? It's just overt, 19th century propaganda. Is this the fortune cookie you were speaking of? I'd love for you to actually go through paragraph by paragraph and attempt a robust defense of any of it.
Maybe start with this section:
Fellow-Citizens, it was in the heat of this war of moral elements, which brought one Stuart to the block, and hurled another from his throne, that our forefathers sought refuge from its fury, in the then wilderness of this Western World.
They were willing exiles from a country dearer to them than life.—But they were the exiles of liberty and of conscience, dearer to them even than their country. They came too with Charters from their kings: for even in removing to another hemisphere, they “cast longing, lingering, looks behind,” and were anxiously desirous of retaining ties of connexion with their country, which, in the solemn compact of a charter, they hoped by the corresponding links of allegiance and protection to preserve.
But to their sense of right, the charter was only the ligament between them, their country, and their king. Transported to a new world, they had relations with one another, and relations with the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to which they came, for which no royal charter could provide. The first settlers of the Plymouth colony, at the eve of landing from their ship, therefore, bound themselves together by a written covenant; and, immediately after landing, purchased from the Indian natives the right of settlement upon the soil.
Thus was a social compact formed upon the elementary principles of civil society, in which conquest and servitude had no part. The slough of brutal force was entirely cast off: all was voluntary; all was unbiassed consent; all was the agreement of soul with soul.
>Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?
Yes. The "no one is putting a gun to users' heads" argument is irrelevant when it comes a trillion-dollar company invested in behavioral modeling deliberately driving engagement.
"Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users" (2018)
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959
"Addicted by Design: The Hidden Psychology Behind Social Media’s Hold on Us" (2025)
https://information-warfare.com/addicted-by-design-the-hidde...
What an interesting instinct for civics you have.
You get to strip hundreds of millions of people of individual agency on the basis of your stumbling through a handful of headlines, all adhering to the recent trend of reducing human conduct into some neat pathology.
What does this portend for your politics? How to manage this vast polity of addicts? What regime of involuntary commitment will you come up with to force virtue into those that have slipped into this addictive vice?
Maybe while you're at it you can repeal the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. After all, surely this is what John Quincy Adams was after as he expounded upon the nature of American freedom in such flowery terms. The power to moralize over your fellow man, too feeble to resist the likes of fermentation, Facebook or the fruit.
>He's so evil but the vast majority of Americans can't give up his products? Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?
People are perfectly fine with him making products, what they aren't fine with is he (and his peers) starting to think they're kings and trying to overrule the citizens of a state he doesn't live in. If it comes down to a chatbot and the latter they'll chose the latter. The datacenter opposition, of which there are by the way hundreds at this point across the country generally attract 70/30 if not higher majorities.
I'm also not sure what I'm not supposed to support in those paragraphs because, as to your point about inflation, that is currently the consequence of America's ongoing military action in the world, as unpopular as the datacenters, and as the founders were fond to point out the reason for ever more higher levels of taxation, increased state size and lower prosperity. As true today as it was back then.
The modern American standard of life is based on global integration and state power.
If you want to go back to some Garden of Eden fiction regarding Plymouth Rock based on the propagandizing of America's first nepo president you will not find much competition in your pursuit of a life of poverty and subsistence farming. Go log off and enjoy the woods.
Or get serious and propose a plan for continued American economic dominance and standard of life in a world where data centers are demonized, when the economic engine of the future is compute.
> He's so evil but the vast majority of Americans can't give up his products?
Hello maynmar genocide. Hello selling weight loss products to teenagers algorithms determined as having low self esteem.
Yes, in winner takes all economy, one person can be prettt evil and have all tge economic power.
What complicity in such evil does a user of his products face, if any? Are most people evil then? If not, what excuse for them can you offer that does not rob them of their human agency? Or do you agree with another commenter that all users of his products are necessarily zombies?
Speaking of such creatures: If someone trolls you on his platform, is that his fault too? What conduct should he control on such a wide platform? What should he not? Is an oversight in said control, in either direction, tantamount to the guilt of conducting the act in question itself?
Is your version of the dead internet theory that Mark Zuckerberg authors all posts on Facebook? Do you have any answers? Or do you offer only scapegoats?
I don't understand how the abundance of AI datacenters translates into wellbeing of common folk. Right now AI is a net negative for the people.