What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
I tried to look for one in my state and a few surrounding areas and couldn’t find any. There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
There was another story about a small town without any major electricity or communication infrastructure coming together to impose a moratorium on data center construction. There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all, but they felt so threatened that they needed to convene and put on a big show about banning it.
The social phenomenon of the data center construction protest movement is really fascinating. My assumption is that it will run its course and then be mostly dropped when the next current thing comes along.
There are some actual concerns about using natural gas instead of trying to utilize the optimal power sources or locations, but they’re mostly overshadowed by bogeyman complaints like thinking that a data center is going to end up in your backyard or water consumption that is negligible compared to golf courses and swimming pools.
You have to be fair on this though. The time to ban something is before they start talking about doing it, not after. Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.
>Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.
It's not merely "never a bad thing", for certain tools like zoning it is, at least in the jurisdictions I know of, required to be well ahead and consistently enforced. It's not something towns are allowed to do retroactively, if you have no proper legal town plan/zoning setup in place as well as various ordinances like noise then by default the only controls are the relatively weak state ones. There are many things a government is allowed to do if it's part of an overall plan that applies to all equally, but not if it's "we just don't like those guys specifically", and the best way to demonstrate that is to be making no special moves around a given arrival at all but rather to have it all setup.
Of course, there are as you suggest lots of other good reasons to be ahead too. It's a lot easier to consider things thoroughly and get community agreement when there isn't massive time pressure or lobbying going on and emotions aren't running high. It's easier to get some expert consultation at reasonable prices (in some cases there may even be community members with the skills and willingness to volunteer if it's not a time crush), to enact longer term infrastructure plans, to get any state approval if needed, etc etc. But there are legally serious hard lines as well and if towns are caught napping they may just not be able to use them at all.
> especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure.
Small, remote towns without electricity or data connections are not easily exploited for data centers.
Instead it's locations that begin with cheap electricity (attracting the datacenter) but the residents fear a significant increase in electricity costs with no local economic benefits to offset it.
It's more like garbage dumps. People don't want to moderate their production of garbage, they just don't want any consequences of it to be too close to their house.
This is not a good or reasoned take. People organize where the other people are because that's how you get the most people. It is nor hypocrisy to use Facebook as a platform to organize protests against other tech companies. Just as it is not hypocrisy to criticize the society you live within.
This is a very stupid observation made by people who can't be bothered to consider the realities of life away from their keyboard.
They should buy land in middle of nowhere, many miles from any closest town, no less than 5. And they should build and provide their own electricity.
I don't see any other solution to make everyone coexist in peace.
Imagine it was your house a mile from such a monster. Eyesore, noisy.
What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.
Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?
And the current plan - building a data center in Canaan Valley - is a whopper... 785 MW natural gas power plant on site with diesel generator backups (solely for the data center, not sold back to grid), 500+ acres of land, 2 million sqft initial building space, air quality impact assessment by the state is heavily redacted, $4 billion price tag.
All right next to one of DC's most popular outdoor/skiing recreation areas. The DC would loom over the two towns that support the entire region.
They'd probably love to sell spare capacity back to the grid but the way interconnection is handled they'd likely be on the hook for a bunch of other upgrades to facilitate that hence why they're not.
You can't "just" add generation to the capacity to the grid without $5-15mil (could be way more but that'll usually torpedo a project) of cost.
They simply take a lot of space, and the city gave sweet tax deals, and they employ almost no one. The locals aren't happy with that type of land use.
What bothers me is clearing forests, sometimes even protected forests with the idea that they'll ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.
>Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.
So in other words burn the credibility and reputation of whatever you're using for that purpose so you can pull a quick "fuck you got mine" to the tune of several cents per kwh off your bill.
That sort of policy making is not sustainable and is exactly the sort of selfish shortsighted thinking that birthed the current political climate.
Edit: At leas you're honest about it. The usual peddlers of such stuff are in denial about what they're doing so they can't be made to understand the tradeoffs.
It's partly about people's nominal objections, but mostly an attempt to hold them hostage to extract some energy bill subsidies (and general cost of living relief).
Suburbs cannot continue to pay for their infrastructure without drastically increasing taxes or finding new sources of income.
How did they get in?
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""
Ironically, There’s enough issues with the DC buildout going on that even with 100% public opinion support it would still be significantly delayed. The behind the meter power generation isn’t going well. There’s only so many gas fired turbines on the market. And connecting a DC to an established grid isn’t like clicking a button in AWS no matter how much money you have.
This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement, as someone who lives in Northern Virginia and is effectively watching the Datacenter battle unfold from the front lines, and dealing with the local politics and electricity costs rising at a precipitous rate.
Our electricity bill has doubled. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors want to erect “Statue of Liberty” sized power transmission lines, and those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.
Part of the reason people care about Datacenters now is that they’re starting to litter the landscape, take resources from local municipalities, and raise costs for everyone involved, whereas previously there were not enough of them to really move the needle as being a problem.
Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”.
Talking points like:
"We should call data centers what they actually are: surveillance centers designed to put us all in a digital prison by 2030"
It's fishy. People aren't quite showing up and saying the same things at city council meetings, but the local city anti-DC group is full of people reposting this stuff. One clickbait article in particular, "there's no such thing as a closed loop system".
There's real concerns with the data centers. But, the opposition to them doesn't feel entirely organic (imo).
The story never questions if they are right, simply tried to smear the argument based on the sources.
That's not incorrect though; you're still needing to shed the heat energy SOMEWHERE. Thermodynamics alone dictates that basic fact. You may not waste the cooling solution but all that excessive GPU heat is going to need to go somewhere - and the only place it ultimately goes is right into the environment.
Ever stand a bit away from a campfire because you got too warm, only to have the wind hit it and blow hot air over you? Same thought exercise applies here.
I mean, isnt that what Karp, Thiel are openly saying and one of the things Antropic doom trolls about?
The Anti-DC crowd doesn't appreciate that the surveillance state is coming with our without all these DC's being built. That is going to get hosted some where, some way. The fix is regulatory and political.
So, what you say amounts to "it is true, but do nothing at all". What they do is "do the thing we can do".
You, CEOs and this crowd all agree. It ia just that some think it is a good thing (CEOs), anything except impossible is pointless (you).
You can read some of the recent reporting here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
While agreeing with where you're coming from, including this, it is also worth nothing that there is truth to what you're rejecting as well. Our longstanding unsolved domestic problems are fertile ground for nation state competitors to foment discontent, gain oppositional mindshare, and ultimately harm our overall position. The elites seem to think these problems can just be ignored or swept under the rug, when in reality the frustration grows until it boils over into highly destructive self-owns. We're already seeing this actively play out on a grand scale with general politics, but it can certainly happen in more specific ways that target things like data centers.
To be industrially competitive we need to fix our longstanding domestic problems that fall on individuals, rather than merely ignoring them. In the case of data centers - lack of effective environmental regulations around air and sound pollution, complete inability for municipalities to regulate the operations of something after it's been built, and a shortage of infrastructure that's now been privatized for use by the highest bidder.
Plus that general affordability crisis you touched upon, of course. Nobody likes the feeling that an appendage of a trillion dollar company can come to their city, wave around the promise of everything-bubble money, and make it so their own individual voice is meaningless.
https://www.amazon.com/Active-Measures-History-Disinformatio...
Yes, there's propaganda and most of it doesn't reach the Americans. It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented.
Not what was being claimed by anyone you're possibly responding to.
Read Active Measures to actually understand what is being discussed here, assuming it's available in your country. The author isn't from the US.
This is not what I said at all. Try to hold more one idea in your head at once.
Also, it's amusing you think you know my political leanings or that it would somehow affect the accuracy of what is being discussed. It's strange how people think that they can win arguments by casting the person they're debating into some group they've decided is already wrong.
Anyways, go google the term and then pretend like you knew what it was all along and that you're an expert on Russian influence campaigns of the 20th and 21st centuries. That works well on Twitter and Reddit, maybe it'll work here too?
One thing that has near radicalized me is the rampant dishonesty on this subject. Data center builders/users have the audacity to tell me that my rates aren't going up, but also if they are it isn't their fault, but even if it is their fault they will actually lower my rates in the long term (but somehow, never promising to pay us back for the damage in the short term).
It really, really bothers me how slimy the people doing this are.
This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy.
> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...
Ugly giant buildings that take up valuable land and require lots of infrastructure meanwhile providing no jobs are a very bad deal.
If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them.
Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-nevil...
Previous coverage of Singham, who coincidentally is married to a co-founder of Code Pink:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
Not saying these are correct and are proof, but this isn't some fringe concern from the MAGA crowd or something. It would also be a logical response on China's part to the US working to block them from getting GPUs, processor tech, etc.
Data centers being directly tied to increases in our power bills.
Or CEOs talking about how they're going to get to fire everyone because of AI.
Or social media raising the political temperature.
Or all of them combined. Tech has never been so intolerable across the board.
"These AI people are getting rich selling unicorn farts while I'm on the same pay and everything is more expensive, fuck them".
Ignore at your own peril.
(Ftr. the article doesn't have an opinion on whether Americans like AI, just my take.)
Weirdly, it sounds like populist sentiment.
Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town.
(On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)
Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.
They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
I understand if people don't want a DC near them i just don't understand why they care now. I have some pretty big ones about 3miles from me and next door to both are residential areas and businesses. In fact, some of the biggest ones where i live (Dallas) are so understated you have to know it's a datacenter beforehand to even realize what you're looking at. There are some really large ones in Carrolton TX that are nestled right up to neighborhoods, i bet 95% of the people don't even know they're there and the 5% that do probably work there or host there.
the carrolton dc https://maps.app.goo.gl/mv3wo96ZTuhRBkGy5
Society hasn't felt the very real effects of data centers until recently. Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. We've started to learn just how bad all those dams we built are for the environment and many of them are tied to data center money. Elon Musk waltzed into Memphis and stood up a natural gas data center that has basically poisoned the surrounding area.
Maybe nation state actors are helping, that can always be true. It is also true that the American people are starting to realize they've been had many times over and are just starting to ask for a better deal. I think we should listen.
Maybe some kind of progressive pricing for power would be appropriate. I'm not sure if this exists, and correct me if it does, but maybe the second MW should cost an order of magnitude more then the first, and so on.
Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.
There's no need to invent some malign foreign conspirator to generate unpopularity for this stuff. No, the AI companies are led by unpopular CEOs, who are making unpopular statements (almost cartoonishly so). And opposing a data center is the kind of action that regular people, upset about this sort of stuff, feel that they can actually meaningfully effect. So of course it was going to balloon like it has.
I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story.
This is a datacenter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 I doubt many people even know its a datacenter. Its pretty much any other office building.
This is also a datacenter. I imagine just about everyone living nearby knows its a datacenter. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6
Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.
ok now this is something i understand and haven't thought about, thank you. I've visited the stargate construction site in Abilene TX since it's not too far from me (3hrs). The scale is indeed unlike any DC i've ever seen before.
edit: "...howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" .." you're talking about XAI's data centers in Memphis right? I don't think that's a fair comparison, that was knocked together in like 100 days. Those generators are on trailers.
No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.
The AI data centers consume a lot more power, and thus generate a lot more heat(equals cooling noise) per square meter.
This is the reason why it's a new problem right now.
Edit: autocorrect used breasts instead of beasts.
Ambient noise must be contained, excess heat must be mitigated, free hot water must be provided to nearby buildings. etc. Also this is a city's opportunity to do something like assess penalty tax points. (ie, datacenter usage tax, just like we do to hotels)
It's a waste of time and money for each town and county to come up with those requirements. If your community puts any limits on the datacenter builder they'll just build it somewhere else, so you might as well save the effort and just say they can't do it.
> they'll just build it somewhere else
Why should we have rights to say they cannot do it somewhere else? It's not a moral issue, it's a tragedy of commons issue or unpriced externality issue.
what seems to be happening in practice is that the companies building these data centers will just take you to court over the limits being illegal and make that fight cost more than the town's entire annual budget, thus inducing the town to give up.
I do not understand this idea that someone from one place should have their preferences taking precedence the preferences, rights and freedoms of folks who actually live in another place.
The main caveat being the boundary lines, but i think that's very much an edge case.
It's America. They don't do regulations there.
The more serious answer is that this political movement is leading to more strict regulation being enacted, it just wasn't in place because of reason #1 and the problems being much less severe.
Additionally, the tech industry is notoriously hostile to any kind of regulation. Especially now with AI. Just look at how many people in this thread will insist that it's "Chinese Propaganda", despite clear evidence that this is just a response to the actual problems datacenters cause. One news crew interviewing people with jet turbine noise will do more than a million of Beijing's finest trolls.
A sane municipality will require sound mitigation on generators, chillers, and other loud equipment. Sure, there are shitty places that don’t take care of their citizens that will let you run natural gas turbines to generate power, but it’s possible to contain the bad effects of data centers with local and state regulations.
I’ll take a data center that evaporates water to replace the iron casting foundry in my neighborhood any day.
The power usage is massive, and that's still a very much limited resource for which everyone competes for.
Adding to your edit: Would you feel the same about adding an AI data center on top of the iron casting foundry you already have to deal with?
If the data center follows the city statutes for noise levels at the property line that exist in my municipality, then sure, I’ll take the data center above the iron foundry.
> Power usage is massive
The utility can approve or deny the connection. Data centers in areas without any available power are not getting grid connections.
The really large data centers have to go into areas with a lot of land and utility connections. These are usually zoned commercial or industrial already.
I'm not saying they should want a data center in their backyard but headline wise "not in my backyard" is true of almost everything.
Once a data center shows up, that plot of land is locked out of more productive development for decades.
Why did you?
Yes, this is the crux. Loud, smelly, concrete cities suck. And you’re right that density alone would lead to this.
What we’d ideally want is cities that can be dense without being loud, smelly, and dangerous. These cities exist: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Zurich, Utrecht, Freiburg, etc.
We can’t do this in the US because we can’t remove the source of the noise/danger/stink/concrete problem: cars.
And that’s the catch 22: In the US everyone gets around by car, so density becomes undesirable. We can’t densify because density + cars is bad, and we can’t reduce cars because it’s not dense enough for public transit to get better.
Individuals get stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma where driving is safer, more comfortable, and faster than transit. So every individual with the means to drive chooses to drive. Public transit becomes branded as something for poor people. The concrete honeycomb fills up. The downtown becomes a noisy disaster. People can no longer imagine that good cities are possible.
1) sometimes it is noisy at night, usually because of people in cars, but sometimes because of people not in cars;
2) sometimes it takes longer than needed to walk somewhere, due to intersections
3) my house is not as big as I would like. (I think this applies to many people regardless of how big their house is.)
4) the busses are always late in winter
Vegans gave us the Impossible Burger, which I'll eat instead of regular burgers when available. What might anti-car people trigger as a positive?
Indeed, the way we have effectively banned density everywhere is wildly inappropriate. Cities should allow dense development. That is, after all, the whole idea of cities: attain the benefits of agglomeration. Cities rejecting anything other than detached single family houses in most of their footprints is contradictory to their purpose.
Anyway if you densify cities you can slow down the sprawl and maybe keep suburbs actually smaller? a few more ten story apartment blocks downtown might house the people who have to live in your area and commute.
This is also why communist countries had stuff like dense housing in deeply rural areas, and why most people were shuffled into cities. Big houses and properties do nothing for the state and just encumber society. Way easier if everyone just lives in their tightly packed central shoe box.
ETA: I would rather no data centers be built, but my point is if we have to, let’s minimize the number of people who are affected. Offer to move them if need be.
Boonies have very poor in each of those and building it up would take too long so throw another in Northern Virginia since they have expensive access to additional of that but at least it will become operational.
It's the age old problem. The people in the cities cry that there are no jobs and the rural businesses cry that they can't find anyone to hire, with no great resolution as the businesses cannot afford to move into the city and the people don't want to travel to the boonies.
However, in this case, these data centers are so well capitalized that they can afford to move them into the cities right beside where the workers are located.
None of this NIMBYism is about the datacenter itself, it's all a protest against AI making the economy really shitty for them.
EDIT: yes, I know mining towns had their own share of problems (I’ve heard “16 tons” too), but knowing the hazards of the past, I think we can figure out a more equitable structure with this kind of setup.
In modern times, both parents often have career ambitions, and the modern capitalist economy and housing pricing has greedily recalibrated to every family needing two incomes. So you're not going to have many families willing to move to the boonies unless you (at the bare minimum) hand out doubly-high salaries.
Very likely that's not enough though, as it's also a massive financial risk to them if you can just lay them off after the next earnings report with no pension to continue supporting them. Most modern families would rather stay where jobs are slightly more likely to exist.
These types of opportunities already exist but are rarely taken up upon. More of them means more jobs unfilled.
When those mining towns were the way of the world people moved around a lot more. It was no big deal to pack your bags and move there. While census data only started being collected from the 1950s onward, it is estimated that ~40% of the population would move in a given year at the hight of the mining booms. Even in the 1950s, when we started collecting concrete data, around 30% of the population would move in a given year. Now only around 8% of the population will move in a given year.
Nowadays there is an expectation that you can stay put. For example, if you watch housing affordability discussions closely you'll notice the theme is always "I cannot afford a house where I am currently located", not "I cannot afford a house anywhere in the world". Attitudes about living arrangements have changed as compared to the past and the AI companies are not about to change it back any time soon. They have to work with people they want to hire, and that means putting the work where the people are already found.
Should be able to locally source security and building maintenance, if the pay is good. These are skills that are needed everywhere. The onsite tech can likely be sourced locally too: first and foremost, they're remote hands ... knowledgeable remote hands are nicer, but the mandatory skills are: read and follow directions, notice and report unusual circumstances, lift and manipulate heavy objects. It's not rocket surgery.
If you put your datacenter in the near boonies, say 30 minutes away from the nearest suburb, you can usually still find the big lots you need, and people can commute from there: a 30 minute commute with no traffic isn't too awful. Of course, you'll have neighbors on large lots who didn't think through that living out on the boonies with no zoning meant noisy neighbors could move in. :P
You want your datacenter to be in reach of interstate highways (rail might be nice, too), two electrical substations [1], and close to fiber that's already run. That restricts your available boonies, but there's still lots outside of the east coast.
[1] yes, you'll have onsite generation, and yes, you might plan to run from onsite generation most of the time, but you still want to have the option for utility power, and it's nice to have two substations to get more uptime, subject to more transfer switch complexity.
In fairness, the companies behind these data centres are well known and have endless marketing budgets, so they can likely find a way to close that gap where the typical rural-based business cannot, but at the same time why take the risk when you can just as easily build the datacenter right beside the person you want to hire?
I mean, typically you just list your job in the nearby major city, even when the site address isn't there. Same thing that you do when listing your hotel or your car for sale.
But, again, why take the risk when you can just as easily put the work right beside the workers?
1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house. 2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid. 3. Don't burn the earth with CO2. 4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance. 5. Pay a lot of taxes.
But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.
What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters
1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles. 2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent. 3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good. 4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty. 5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.
Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.
It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.
That's not what people are doing though. People are genuinely afraid for the future, and much of the data center backlash is driven by emotion. You can see this reflected in populist political movements. People have a (well-founded) sense that those in power don't have their interests in mind and they're lashing out without much thought.
You know, human stuff.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapleRidge/comments/1ewgim0/maple_r...
2. https://nationalpost.com/life/the-important-questions-is-it-...
3. https://jeremyl.substack.com/p/nimbytales-stop-the-sound-of-...
4. https://torontolife.com/city/this-corner-store-owner-spent-y...
These examples basically amount to “some people didn’t like this”, which doesn’t mean that the balance of public opinion wasn’t favourable. Unanimous support is too high a bar.
Everyone should be in support of this idea.
Everyone else gets to be free from datacenter pollution, and the Csuites get their datacenters.
Win win.
My wacky idea was that datacenters should be built on EPA superfund sites. It becomes a win-win. Datacenter gets land that humans cannot occupy, helps/funds partial cleanup, slaps a big ass concrete building down on top of the rest of the mess and kills two birds with one stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
It's cheaper this way.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
Or if you prefer; a much deeper non-vibecoded, scientific source with lots of citations: https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Centers-Impact-Global-Resource...
I love how you went from posting links to articles to make arguments for you, to then editing your comment to link to a $250 book that I should buy and read, so it can make your argument for you.
But I also feel there needs to be an assertion that if you own the land it's your property and you're free to do most things with it, safely and politely. This is about property rights and freedoms.
Your property rights stop where my ears are. Or I have the freedom to not listen to your gas turbine. Or however one wishes to flip that on its head. Whether you own the property or not, that property isn’t in a vacuum.
The point is you should be allowed to have a gas turbine (or whatever generator meets the requirements), if it meets emissions, noise, and heat regulations.
IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as…
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hops. But there are examples of data centers being approved with minimal public comment, if any. Musk’s data center in Memphis is frequently trotted out, and for good reason. When the “as long as” part takes place, we can discuss the legality of NIMBY.
NIMB is part of setting those standards.
In a nearby town, the city was planning on putting a moratorium on new data centers, and so a lot of companies rushed their application in before the moratorium start date. They all got approved. The local citizens got really mad that they were approved, and the city simply said "Look: We legally cannot deny them permits if they're conforming to current requirements."
So yes, you're right. And yes, your statement is mostly irrelevant. NIMBYism is always about the future requirements. It's not as if enacting a rule disallowing high density residences will force existing ones to be torn down.
Happened to family of mine. Not in the US though. They charge their EV with a 3kW charger now.
It seems like people are some how railing against basic economics?
Like if we dont like it we have a marketplace of alternatives, the opportunity to invest in new supply, and the choice to not consume said energy if the price is too high...
When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.
I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.
They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.
Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.
The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries. They're starting to learn about the effect consistent noise at that level has on their mental & physical well-being as well.
Do they? How much noise do you imagine comes from a data center that isn't operating a gas turbine?
They could build these data centers to eliminate the noise but it’s cheaper to ruin the livability of surrounding areas.
Undoubtedly if you get some measurement equipment and stand next to a data center you could register some infrasound, but the same would be true if you stand next to an ordinary office building or in an empty field, because infrasound carries for hundreds of miles and there are much larger sources than data centers.
"There is a sound but you can't hear it trust me bro" is solidly into YouTube quacks territory.
Something that tech bros fundamentally oppose.
"ask ... if they [Zuckerberg, Thiel etc] want one of these data centers in their own backyard"
A highly power and/or water consumptive data center being installed in a town or city is pretty much a perfect embodiment of people's frustrations. It consumes tons of power and/or water and therefore drives up utility costs for the locals or pollutes the air with diesel exhaust. And it doesn't create jobs so it's just frankly some rich cabal of capitalists getting richer while people's lives continue to feel materially worse. I can't think of a better embodiment of the sort of confluence of crumminess that seems to be underway.
> Water UK estimated that datacentres in England use 6.6m litres of drinking water every day.
> England’s current water shortfall is 220m litres more a day than was assumed in water forecasts.
A new class of oligarchs are trying to obsolete every profession and human endeavor for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. You don't need a PhD in environmental policy or domain expertise in construction to listen to what AI advocates are saying and realize their success comes at the expense of society, and say "no thank you."
Data center construction is not a proxy for powerlessness, but the vanguard of the powerful.
I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.
This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.
Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.
Yes.
Source: learned more than I want to about solar farm development.
Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening.
Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.
Point to _any_ analysis that says the current building boom is anything but speculation.
xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too.
DC buildout is purely a gold rush. A play to be the one left standing after all the weaker players die.
You’re probably thinking of Meta. Google renting GPUs is a less recent phenomenon, to say the least.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-2...
Demand is very high today and exceeds capacity. Builders think demand will continue to grow. This seems plainly correct. Firms may differ in how high demand will go, but it is still more than today.
Whether or not the datacenters return on the investment is a different question.
at least in texas that's what they are doing, building them out in the middle of nowhere or close to the middle of nowhere. The issue that I keep seeing pop up is behind the meter power generation ( gas turbines ) is hitting roadblock after roadblock. There just aren't very many and GE is scaling up but i mean it's not like adding RAM in AWS, it's going to take half a decade to see the increased inventory to buy one let alone onsite and operational.
"...demand from utilities, data centers and other power users continues to stretch manufacturing schedules into the next decade."
https://www.compressortech2.com/news/ge-vernova-raises-gas-t...
some are resorting to using ocean liner engines to generate electricity.
"That naturally explains the recent order flow into large reciprocating engines. In April, the Finnish vessel engine manufacturer Wärtsilä Oyj Abp announced a 790 MW off-grid power solution for a new Texas data centre facility,"
https://globalalphacapital.cclgroup.com/insight/gacm-from-se...
I live amongst the urban brownfields of Baltimore and our politicians are under tons of pressure to stop data center projects (and to tar and feather utility executives).
Has anyone thought about perhaps tar and feathering the politicans and bureaucrats that wrote all the rules that make greenfield development with a transmission line tap a non-starter?
The developers would looooove to not deal with brownfields, not have pissed off neighbors, not deal in complex urban sites, etc, but greenfield above a tiny size is effectively outlawed piecemeal in many states.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/elon-musk-... https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1014655584252361
To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear.
If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.
These people likely had nothing to do with the delay in solar installs, or decades of nuclear NIMBYism yet now because Musk cannot fall behind, they now have to suffer with no one in government caring about them.
Its a real life hell, they cannot physically resist or cause any trouble or else the government will come and kill them where they stand, they cannot afford to move away because who would buy their houses (and why should they abandon their life's community for something they had no part in?) so they sit and suffer day after day with declining health for their family. Framed like this, Musk is like a locust who has come to devour whatever good there was and then move onto the next prey.
I don't think the conversion is as straightforward as they claimed. But they're also not claiming that they currently pull gigawatts of electricity.
You asked about energy usage; but I have no idea as to how that bakery's natural gas usage affects the people surrounding it.
The smell of freshly baked fig newtons might offset the possible increased cost of gas-per-cubic-foot.
what makes this bakery comparable in terms of energy usage and pollution?