1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount.
2. Construct a public swimming complex nearby, heated with waste data center heat.
3. Local governments can enforce strict limits on environmental noise at the property boundary. I've personally stood right next to a 150MW-class datacenter and experienced sound levels less than traffic from a typical suburban 4-lane street; making the datacenter quieter than any other industrial use is a choice the builder can make if they have the right incentives.
Setup directional microphones around the perimeter, and fine them $25,000 per minute per dB above the agreed threshold. Distribute the fines to the neighbors. Failure to pay promptly means the sheriff shuts down the power.
All of these options are far cheaper than launching the data center into space...
I think many data centre opponents understand that being opposed to AI is not sufficient to halt a local project, so it is noise, water use and power consumption that they latch onto - although, in jurisdictions without plentiful water and clean power, those two reasons are quite valid.
In my own local community, there’s vocal opposition to a proposed data centre that is next to Lake Ontario, 500 metres from the nearest residential neighbourhood, on a brownfield site with 500 megawatts of clean power capacity. None of that makes a difference to those opposed.
It's the same tired distraction pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.
The medium is the message.
I do not want one penny of infrastructure that I have paid for in order to grow/better my community going to subsidize infrastructure for datacenters.
My proposal would be to require data-centers to provide enough clean energy to power themselves for years to come. That would help humanity survive. Plus it would lower energy costs when there is more power-generaion available. Lowering your power-bill would make people love AI.
I generally agree that I would not like to live across the street from a datacenter. Having worked inside of dozens of them, I could not care less if I lived half a mile from one. Most people who live within such a distance currently do not have a clue. At that point I would not even worry about the noise from the backup generators.
It’s just not representative of the bigger picture when there are a dozen horrible projects against say 1000 total.
The hyperbole is what gets my mom terrified of moving to a city that might allow a datacenter to be built 8 miles away from the place she was looking at.
I'm sure that will be a great consolation to the thousands of people who have to live near them. "Don't worry, your situation is very rare! That's why we don't have to do anything about it."
One _extremely_ rational and common reason that people oppose these projects is that they can bid-up the energy cost in their regions, meaning that one of the residents biggest monthly bills gets bigger.
A second one goes around pollution and noise, particularly when the AI DataCenter is using "portable" gas turbines or similar.
Solutions are hard, but possible... so long as the decision makers are able to recognize that much of the opposition is quite rational, and that the deals struck need to accommodate the legitimate and rational concerns, while avoiding getting hung up by true nonsense.
It's relatively easy to avoid being that egregious about it if you're a little bit patient on construction permits and power contracts.
NIMBY opposition to datacenter construction is orthogonal to that, except insofar as in both cases the construction will gravitate toward places that won't or can't object to the construction.
Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.
1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)
2) your example primarily used undesirable land.
3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.
4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.
All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.
Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.
Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.
(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")
It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there.
The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area.
Agreed on the tax abatement stuff. Those should be outright illegal regardless of industry.
I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely).
Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.
I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.
I'm pretty sure the utility where I am has been able to get rate increases approved partly based on rising prices they have to pay to buy power on the wholesale market when they do not have enough capacity of their own to cover all their customers.
I never once noticed significant noise from any of them - they are nearly all on the opposite side of a wide road from the nearest housing, and the road is louder than the data center. There is enough electric supply in the region that they almost never run the gas turbine generators.
As a way of growing the industrial tax base of an area, they are one of the least dirty ways to use industrially zoned land, though they don't produce as many long term jobs. There is a big data center construction and design industry in that region, and it did pull Amazon to open HQ2 nearby, but those are both first mover effects.
Electricity should function as a common carrier like any other utility. If you want to pay for the watts you get the watts regardless of who you happen to be.
It’s a non-issue. It’s like complaining about a vacant but well maintained warehouse next door.
If you mean living next door to a power plant? Absolutely. But that is a different topic.
It’s not a non-issue right now.
Issues around the cost of infrastructure upgrades being spread over all rate payers are not universal, and can be corrected.
It’s quite the thing to say it’s irrational whilst acknowledging you are insensitive to sounds.
misophonia can be severely disabling. Good overview: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-s...
I've personally had a friend with misophonia (about subsonics) commit suicide (making it difficult to find out from them what was cause or correlation).
The exact opposite is typically true, so this is surprising to me!
If you don’t know where I live how can you know if my claim is true or not?
I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.
I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.
Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.
I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.
If you want to find locations of grid instability focus on growth, both residential and industrial, that is radically out of scale compared to larger geographic averages. Otherwise, it seems like you are measuring using the wrong trends.
What’s crazy is that the grid instability was there before the explosion of data centers and the primary revenue generator of the much larger geographic region is energy transport/production.
Compared to the activism of the 60s and 70s, where so many people seemed willing to put their entire lives on hold for the cause, the fact that there is no major populist uprising against the dismantling of the institution of the presidency leads me to believe there is a threshold of contentment afforded by modern technology and QoL.
In either case it is about populism though. Hopping on a bus to California to protest was a cool thing to do. Somehow this data center thing happened to catch on and become a lever people felt they could move with mere outrage, even if it does seem pretty misguided.
Talking to people on HN, the answer is a resounding "NO." If I point out that smart phones are contributing to mental illness and have enabled mass-scale surveillance larger than ever previously thought possible, the response has been "but I might have trouble paying for parking and some restaurants don't have menus."
- touch controls rather than a real UI
- a terrible app store full of monetized garbage
- incredibly bad privacy options
- etc ..
In addition to that, modern society is moving towards requiring the usage of these devices. It's harder to opt out more and more every year. This is very much not a choice I can make. My employer would NOT accommodate me if I did not have a place to install their OTP app.
They did. They elected Trump.
> no major populist uprising against the dismantling of the institution of the presidency
Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working (or even actively working against them). So they implicitly want a strong president.
This only goes as far as the president agrees with them of course.
I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism.
> Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working
I think consciously verbalizing a position even that nuanced and esoteric is niche, but there is certainly something to be said for peoples' susceptibility to a type of "strong" cult leader.
Whatever else you'd want to say about Trump supporters, I wouldn't call them apathetic. Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong, but I can't see how anyone could characterize Trump's base as "apathetic."
And I would say that speaks more to your disconnect with most of US society. Very few folks actually trust activists for good reason.
Trump is like the most mild form of what is to come. The fact he got elected when he did is remarkable to me.
It only gets worse from here if things don’t change. At some point someone like him who is actually serious will be elected and then it’s basically game over.
Trump 2016 was a warning shot most folks in the chosen classes chose to ignore. Trump 2024 is something you ignore at your own peril at this point. I would be thanking the gods at the relative apathy so far if I believed that narrative.
If Trump was remotely competent we would be having entirely different conversations. There would be no option of “weathering the storm” to wait him out if so.
I don't follow. What I said is in alignment with the idea that activism is out of vogue. The comment I replied to implied that electing Trump was an act of activism (or "doing something about it").
Anyway, we already had Hitler. Sadly too often, these guys pop up at the right time and wreak havoc but I would say they're outliers (and in general the world is globalizing and trending away from them).
There is some misinformation around resource usage, but most data center constructions aren't being fully candid and transparent with their expected resource usage either. I think the key issue is that many major constructions haven't built any trust with local communities nor have they listened to people's concerns, but they feel entitled to force through their projects anyway.
If you think that these AI data centers are great and incredibly beneficial, go advocate for your local government to bring construction to wherever it is that you live. Let people sort themselves out based on their interests.
Zero-sum scarcity mentality needs to end. Don't push back on prosperity. Push to have those gains distributed more evenly.
Push for a ridiculous tax on data centers that goes directly to the local economy. If they don't buy it then it's the same result as blocking them on vibes.
That said, we've seen data center projects often employ much less jobs than expected. I know Core Scientific when they did a data center in like Texas they employed like 10 people not 200
So imo I dont think the article truly represents the opinions and thoughts of most michiganders
* Billionaires
* Job Loss
* AI slop floods
Ultimately they feel the need to be activists and they do so by being NIMBYs because you can have a ton of influence in municipal politics.
if they weren't concerned then "hawaiian bunkers" wouldnt even be in society's vernacular.
if any rich people get caught in the crossfire at this point then that's on them but society has made it pretty clear that this is not an "if" situation and more a "when" one.
The interest groups opposing them will do anything, including harming economic growth, jobs, great products, and life-saving research — as long as it kneecaps their rivals.
Assuming positive intent, what’s different nowadays that makes it all different? It would actually make me pretty happy to hear about the incredible leaps and bounds that’ve been taken.
Please square that with a rational argument against data centers then?
Agreed - here in Australia one of the big TV networks was heavily advertising a story last week about the big bad data centres coming to suburbia. You can be critical of Australia's local governments all you want, but at least in the big cities, no one is going without water or power for any appreciable amount of time due to data centres or anything else.
A senator down south has been repeating the noise concern trolling from the USA, but wont even go to his local DC <3 minutes from his office to have a listen. I saw someone defend the noise complaints by saying "Oh but we are getting one of those gas turbine ones" and when I looked at the project it was being built really far away from habitation to take advantage/mutually invest in Gas and Renewable power nearby. (The gas being used as a method to fill a pumped hydro project). Both power sources were approved before the DC.
You just cant win. The stupid is the product.
It really is just a case of opportunistic politicians feeding the mob.
Edit: Well, RBMKs are still running in Russia but with significant safety upgrades.
1. use all the water
2. Increase electric costs but a large amount
3. Increase noise in the neighborhood
If the above was false, no one would care. Plus these data centers provides almost no jobs, so there is no benefit to the community. Granted there is more tax revenue, but the people paying taxes do not see their tax burden go down.
So the wonder why ??
I eagerly await your response.
You are talking about a single incident that has been reported 500 times by different organizations.
And that single instance still hasn’t actually been traced back to the datacenter in question. Could have come upstream of that for all we know now.
Anyone bringing it up does not actually care about the water usage. It’s just a politically easy topic to get traction with. If anyone starts off their anti-datacenter screed with this, it instantly outs them as someone you can ignore as unserious person on the topic.
Plenty of other legitimate reasons to be anti-datacenter but this isn’t one of them.
You know what instantly outs someone as unserious on the topic for me? When they give an unqualified “none of that is true” when someone talks about water use. I agree discussion should carry the nuance, but this conversation started with none of it.
A modern 100MW scale datacenter uses about as much water as a 5-10k population municipality. And provides about as many jobs as a medium-sized wal-mart. Whether that’s a lot to you or not certainly depends on where the proposed datacenter is being built. But it does nobody any good to simply say “nuh uh, you’re wrong” when someone talks about the water use. Nor does bringing up any number of other high-water-using industrial sites that people also wouldn’t want in their back yard.
It’s like private jets. If you talk about PJ use in the first 10 minutes about your diatribe about climate change I already know you give zero care about co2 production and only want to either hate rich folks for valid but unrelated reasons, or are an entirely unserious person.
Both are focusing on a mathematically immaterial number when it comes to the supposed problem they say they care about. It they actually cared, they would be talking about things that matter and can move the needle if they “win”.
I welcome high water use stuff in my back yard because my region has plenty of water, plus I firmly believe in the fact that a society cannot have wealth without industry. Datacenters, steel production, whatever. Bring it on.
Are there specific bad projects that should not happen due to local water concerns? Absolutely! But that is not the discussion anyone is having. Datacenter water usage as an industry is a total non issue and is an increasingly immediate tell that someone has no clue what they speak of.