I’m in Ashburn Virginia and I literally live less than 1 mile from the highest concentration of data centers in the world. People are buying townhomes homes built across the street from data centers.

What you might not understand is Loudoun heavily regulates data centers in this area. All infrastructure improvements needed to power and cool the data centers are paid by service providers. The water used to cool our data centers is sourced from our wastewater which goes through a special treatment facility that was funded by the tax revenue from the data centers.

Our property taxes are lower because the tax revenue from the data centers makes up for the difference. We have excellent schools and fantastic recreation facilities.

Oh yeah, our electricity rates and water rates are competitively low too.

I’m not here to champion data centers, nor am I claiming this is what normally happens when a data center is built.

I’m trying to point out that when they are TAXED and REGULATED, they can actually be a boon the local community.

The problem you’re seeing in these other communities are local governments bending over backwards to bring in data centers to the expense of the local population. They’re paying higher rates for water and electricity because the data center wasn’t forced to pay for infrastructure upgrades upfront, so those costs get passed on to the public.

I don’t mind the data centers. I see them every day and walk past them. They don’t emit pollution and they’re quiet and I’m not interested in moving away. I like it here.

And amplified by the concerns in the post. Many people against them who aren't neighbors wouldn't get as exercised about the centers if they were other, familiar noxious entities. Oil refineries are a necessary evil in our current economy, for example. The AI stuff is an unnecessary evil, the majority of what it helps with is relatively trivial and the costs have been real already. The only way we get abundance from it is by losing enough population that there is more water, energy, arable land, minerals, housing, and other resources for the remaining humans.

The same is true of factories, mills, distribution centers, stockyards, and industrial facilities in general. As these things go, datacenters are relatively benign.

> No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one

Which is more about the people getting rich off them and less about the data center. Once you hit a certain tax bracket living beside any sort of commercial activity that isn't consumer facing becomes below you.

I live near a paper mill, freight rail and a bunch of manufacturing. I don't think anyone here would notice a data center if it didn't show up in our power bills. But, and this relates pretty directly to Mark's comments, this is also a blue collar area so not very threatened by AI, if anything people kind of embrace it because it's a power/wealth transfer away from the people who they see as keeping them down by regulating the source of their wealth out of state and overseas.

This is the issue. There are big differences in how individual companies build and operate data centers. The average hyperscale data center from a major player is vastly different than some of the crypto mining, small time data center builds I’ve seen.

An AI-focused center from AWS, Google, or Meta tends to be large, but also relatively quiet and they make a lot of effort to ensure they’re not overloading the local infrastructure because it poses operational and strategic risks. They also don’t want to alienate the community because they need to get their workforce from the community and they they require a lot more people in site than what most believe.

At the same time, I’ve seen “data centers” built from shipping containers that you can hear cooling fans whining from a mile away.

At the end of the day, the blame really should fall on the local governments to enact and enforce regulations and any anger really should be directed at them.

LLMs in general have a limited use, and are a dead end. So small local LLMs are also a dead end. That of course, does not stop people from using LLMs for purposes that they are not good at.

The common man is grossly uninformed and highly susceptible to misinformation of which there’s a lot of around data centers.