They are quite a polluting technology. https://www.staxengineering.com/stax-hub/the-environmental-i...
They also consume significant water causing water scarcity in many places.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property.
But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when the bubble pops, and local municipalities will be left footing the bill without the tax revenue.
These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.
Edit: People really seem to be ignoring the sentence prior to this edit. For a hundred years it was common for old industrial sites of all shapes and forms to have their equipment if any remained scrapped and then be subdivided among small tenants. Most space leased by smaller businesses in the eastern half of the country probably fell into this category until fairly recently.
Many of these projects are making messes to local infrastructure, the construction and municipal costs associated with that, the wear on local roads, etc. And abandoned buildings are a mess because of their lack of maintenance.
Data centers are essentially an Amazon distribution center that is filled with servers instead of racking with a shitload of electrical and HVAC equipment.
I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.
Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t
What data centers are bringing cheaper software, unlimited cloud storage (for free?), or lower local property taxes?
Consumers like breathing (https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-pollution) and drinking clean water (https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/data-center-accused-m...). The noise is loud enough to cause hearing damage, and the smell and light pollution isn't helping consumers either.
If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.
But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about
The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...
The data centers will ultimately end up being built elsewhere, until those places start pushing back. Without federal protections for the environment or the people all we can do is hope that state, county and city governments step up to make sure that data centers aren't harming them directly.
Only thing new is speed of deployment and scale - which frankly would align with why we can't build in North America.
I would agree that the political system is the place to push if you have real concerns about the our data center / AI build out - and that will be a huge part of this next election. No other way to either accelerate or decelerate outside of macro economic factors outside our countrol.
I would not benefit from an outright ban so that would be too heavy handed. On the other hand - something has to be done. If anything else it's proof the people do have the power to convince their representatives that these affairs matter and we are paying attention.
I wouldn't be to quick to dismiss this as only political theater.
I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt to consider the pros and cons, it's just an effort to shut down unpopular projects to appease the electorate. Maybe that's right, but no need to pretend it's anything more.
It's weird to see "the government is doing its job by responding to its voters" being framed as some nefarious and underhanded move.
https://gist.github.com/impredicative/483b46ff294be6b69b0a34...
It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?
Aluminum smelters use a lot of DC power, but smelters aren't popping up like VC fertilized mushrooms.
People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the people protesting are all factually incorrect about what they are protesting.
Just go after AI directly, or at least frame the arguments against datacenters in the context of AI.
My town also protested when Walmart decided they wanted to install one of their mega shopping centers here. A big building means someone has too much money, and its only a matter of time until they use it against YOU.
Is it? Data centers are being built with tax incentives given to the operators, no regard for impact on the local utilities, and they bring no local jobs (at least not long term). Seems like lots of negatives to communities if development continues like this.
Turns out you you don't have to reach very far at all
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
https://news.asu.edu/20260518-environment-and-sustainability...
We already know that that data centers impact the environment in many ways and can be harmful for the water, air, and the health of the people around them. It's the dose that makes the poison though and so the push for more and more data centers increase the harms.
The rollingstone article is crazy, because it's actually just about agricultural runoff which is poisoning a well Amazon uses for cooling.
My point here isn't that datacenters have zero impact, my point is that if people actually cared about any of these things, datacenters are way down on the list of causes. Unless I suppose you live within 1,700 ft of one.
Did you actually read that article? The issue isn't that amazon is the source of the nitrates, the problem is that it's concentrating them. It's like arguing that desalination plants don't cause pollution because the brine came from the ocean.
I think most people are aware that computers don't emit pollution directly. It's the externalities that do.
2. There is not currently trillions of dollars of investment driving the construction of those projects
3. None of those concerns are currently driving up utility costs in the communities where they exist
You always have to way the pros and cons of such massive projects.
Plus, this isn't a ban it's just a one year moratorium so impact etc can be studied.
It does mean I try to make sure I get it right when I set up. But it also means that if I goofed some cable management then that’s it because I’m not going back to fix it till next time.
Something that would be cool for the future would be if luxury apartment buildings offered their own cabinets for the use of residents. Haha, a man can dream.
It speaks volumes about the degree to which we've regulated and NIMBY'd and everything else'd utility build out that on site generation in any case other than a blackout so pencils out anywhere in the US save perhaps remote regions of Alaska
The point where we decided we would put all infrastructure in N. Virginia, stop owning hardware and rent it from a corporation charging 10x markup was right about when the Internet started going downhill.
When I lived outside of Orlando there was like a dozen in Orlando alone.
If you look up Colo options in your area, what is lacking? These new datacenters are high density AI hypercalers. They are not traditional Colo DC’s. It’s more like a whole new AWS AZ is getting slapped down. More of the same cloud computing you’re complaining about.
Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.
These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.
Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.
We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.
These are the data center issues as I understand them, in ascending order of importance:
* Water use: Almost always a red herring or non-issue, unless the DC is being built in an area with water shortages. DC's use a lot of water, but their use is negligible compared to many other industries.
* Neighborhood appearance: They're not particularly pretty to have in your back yard, but much less ugly than, say, a factory. They're not inherently polluting.
* Power draw: This is a legitimate concern as DC's use an enormous amount of electricity. In the short run, it could make sense for deep-pocketed investors to subsidize residential or non-DC power consumption to keep everyone's electric bills from skyrocketing. Longer term, power companies will need to build much more generating infrastructure. I'd love to see a carbon tax to encourage the construction of renewable (or nuclear) power. Sadly, the current US administration seems intent on vice-maxing and ruining as much as they can for future generations.
* AI-driven job displacement: I think this is the real worry people have. The water use thing is an excuse people are looking for to oppose AI.
My optimistic take is that AI companies won't in fact capture all of the value from automation, because they'll be competing against each other, and against open weights models. But who knows? Maybe a single company will achieve Super-AGI first and they'll own the world. I doubt that will happen, but this is what they're aiming for, and a lot of the money invested only makes sense in light of that goal.
And even in my optimistic scenario, the job disruption will be quite real. New jobs will be created as other jobs are lost to automation. That's well and good after things have settled, but it is very disruptive to people's careers and ambitions in the mean time.
They provide mostly temporary jobs (and majority imported to boot), after construction they're run with very little staff.
New York needs to upgrade its power grid (source?) so they should force it upon themselves by primitively overloading the grid?
A one year moratorium while impact is investigated, esp considering the current state of datacenters buildout, especially considering many in the US are either unstarted, on hold or abandoned, seems reasonable.
In poor rural areas, 50 jobs paying not that much is a big improvement.
The argument here tho is the amount of jobs provided does not do a good enough job counteracting the downsides (noise, ground water pollution, generator air pollution, grid load and offset costs to customers, etc). In most cases these far outweigh <50 jobs if you look at overall cost/benefits.
Then, next year, the AI bubble pops, and most of those data centers shutter their doors and stop contributing tax revenue.
Now you have the same $20k per capita income, but many millions more in debt!
It's pretty well documented that datacenters (esp the AI variety) are offloading grid expenses to customers as higher baseline costs.
The issue is that these DCs are not paying for the cost of the necessary grid upgrades but are instead having the power cos pass these costs off to all consumers as base increases.
50k residents of Lake Tahoe need to find a new source of electricity now that their power provider is planning to feed a nearby data center[0].
0: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-...
> incivility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being uncivil; lack of courtesy; rudeness in manner.
> uncivil sense 1: Not civil; discourteous; impolite
> civil sense 2: (comparable) Behaving in a reasonable or polite manner; avoiding displays of hostility.
> reasonable sense 3: Not excessive or immoderate; within due limits; proper.
> polite sense 1: Well-mannered, civilized.
> well-mannered: Having good manners; polite, courteous and socially correct; conforming to standards of good behaviour.
> hostility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being hostile.
> hostile sense 3: Unwilling.
> discourteous: Impolite; lacking consideration for others.
That's presumably why the feminists developed the concept of "tone policing".
This is the problem.
These are mostly old office buildings.
They are not designed to supply that much electricity and water on each floor. These racks and equipment also weigh a lot and the building floors and building itself probably isn't rated for that.
Not only that, but to get the buildings themselves more electricity and water often requires a very expensive process of digging up possibly multiple streets, with associated costs and permitting.
In addition to the water delivery issue, there's power delivery. It may not even be possible to get that building enough power in the next decade or more, because there simply may not be enough power generation capability.
Basically, a lot of the same problems that exist when trying to turn an old office building into high rise apartments, but magnified many times over.
They don't need to maximize every inch of the building, if that means less capacity then so be it.
As far as water and power, that's why I mentioned in cities that already have capacity. Or at least the ability to run new lines without digging up the roads, because they have tunnels for such things.
B. THE TERM "DATA CENTER" SHALL NOT INCLUDE FACILITIES MAJORITY-OWNED,
OPERATED, OR OTHERWISE CONTROLLED BY A PUBLIC RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND
USED FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES.
To have an equivalent capacity of DCs in space would require such astronomical costs there is 0 chance it would be profitable esp considering how fast GPUs deprecate
How about we start with actually finishing all the datacenters we've started (many if not most are unstarted, paused or outright cancelled)?
Where would the heat go?
A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.
Its states and federal usually offering tax breaks. But at least on the lowest level, it's pretty cheap to buyout a rural town, and that's why you get these town councils voting 9-0 to approve the projects before anyone even hears about it.
> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.
https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/new-york-farms-and-farmland-d...
National trend:
The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.
My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.
Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.
Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.
As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the state.