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
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.
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.
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’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?
1) we’re talking about people pulling unfiltered untreated well water
2) any building would have had exactly the same effect.
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...
> flushed bacteria-contaminated water into public sewers
I do that every morning
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...
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.
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.
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.
They're all drain.
https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
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?
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?
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.
>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?
Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
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.
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.
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.
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
The misconception is that while these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes the levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling.
Power—and with it, noise, pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is, on the other hand, a real and present problem.
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.
(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)
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
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)
Do you think a community is your house
The literal foot traffic of office workers was a major reason brought up by cities trying to force companies to RTO post pandemic.
We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.
>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 are worse for communities than data centers because of all the people that work in them” lmao
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 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 not sure data centers could make the same argument.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
Why not?
You can step over or walk around cracked and buckled concrete.
Trains don’t appreciate having their rail ballast disturbed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
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
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
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.
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.
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.).
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 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
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
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)?
Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.
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.
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
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'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).
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.
>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.
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.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
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.
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.
Also, calling well-intended people with whom you disagree “zombies” is inappropriate. Take it elsewhere.
Not once instance of these datacenters has proven to be beneficial for the communities and economies they're located in.
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.
"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."
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
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
Hats off to whoever is stoking this. It’s witchcraft trials levels of hysteria.
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.
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.
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
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.
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 your 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.
I was responding to why you wouldn’t want one in a different freakin country
The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.
Considering that the initial build out was only 10MW, it seems unlikely that was the primary usecase.
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.
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.
Datacenter noise comes from the chiller units.
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.
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.
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.
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
[1] - https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/data-center-develop...
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.
Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.
Try to build as many new golf courses as there are new data centers going up and you might get a similar reaction...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.
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...
*increasingly nonspecific. See [1] for example
[1] https://floodlightnews.org/ai-data-centers-texas-pollution-l...
Now China is beating us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South–North_Water_Transfer_Pro...
Nothing dumber than reallocating resources thouands of miles away from where they should be.
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.
Aren’t there real instances of metas data centers causing havoc for nearby residents? Light/boise pollution, contaminated water are real things
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
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...)
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?
Who are materially irrelevant to humanity as their only economic skill is make computer go brrr
You all should have stuck to twiddling bits on Rpis in your basement
Fucking losers
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.