- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. I would add, “no property tax breaks”.
Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
This seems imminently fair to me.
Note that the utility monopolies are posting record profits that have increased steadily over the last decade.
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
I think the immediately preceding sentence pretty clearly laid out their rational. (Not saying I agree or disagree, just that I think your question was already answered).
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.
That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.
That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.
They want the data centers, just NIMBY.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Scr...
>They want the data centers, just NIMBY.
Perhaps it's just you, because the votes say otherwise. Housing NIMBYism is people who already have homes preventing new ones from being built, for their own benefit (Price increases on existing stock). That's not what's happening with data centers.
Oh, I use cloud services? Yeah, I pay money for those. They aren't charities.
Building without considering consequences at all, or building the way that capital demands, is how you end up with urban communities getting obliterated by highways[1], or rural communities getting decimated by industrial plants[2], or indigenous communities getting destroyed by military testing[3], or indigenous people AND fragile ecosystems getting erased by military testing[4].
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossville,_Louisiana
- [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
- [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll
Being a NIMBY is wanting affordable housing... somewhere else.
Being a NIMBY is wanting more homeless shelters... somewhere else.
And of course most of the examples you give are irrelevant - they don't even involve private property or specifically involve the government taking private property.
Eminent domain used to seize private land is more similar to prohibiting construction on private land, than allowing it.
Er... I mean, if that's the case, then, fine, I guess?
I do not believe that this is actually the case. People build heavily regulated industrial facilities all the time.
But you want him to come out and say something that he doesn't believe (and has personally contradicted): that he's opposed to data centers as a point of principle, because you're ideologically convinced that that is his viewpoint, because to you that's the only reason someone would put up any type of roadblock to data center build-outs.
Welcome to NIMBY
In other words, welcome to NIABUDSAGTTYGAOP, BATPESLETSGWFLSTL
But I get how that's not as fun to engage with for pithy internet rhetoric.
“Nono, I’m not NIMBY, I just want to set up some goalposts that I can arbitrarily move whenever I want. I just want veto power. Trust me, I’ll use it responsibly”
Decades of no housing follows
We hate NIMBYs when others get what they want.
That’s life I guess.
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
Yes, that's what the politicians in question are proposing.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...
Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.
> for the sake of shareholder value
This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.
You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
> This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me.
At my company's internal conference we had a rep from one of our partners come speak, and he emphasized that a significant value-add of our company's relationship to our partners is that we're much more tech-forward. he went on to say "Execs in [partner industry] don't know what AI is or what it does, but they know that they want it."
We're seeing AI features being bolted into every application under the sun, whether it actually adds functionality or not. I think you bear a significant burden of proof to the claim that the demand for datacenters is in turn driven by consumer demand for AI, and company boards losing their minds over what they think AI can do and demanding their R&D divisions sink millions of dollars into AI spend to try and capitalize on their dreams.
I'm reminded of Bitcoin: for a hot minute every startup was talking about blockchain and GPUs were getting snapped up by miners left and right because of what people imagined the value could be. That's what I'm getting at when I say "shareholder value:" these developments seem to be less about what value a company is _actually_ producing (& thus the inherent cost-of-goods-sold demand), and more about the _possibility_ of what value a company _could_ produce.
This is a good point. I see that I misunderstood your original argument - I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful, rather than what you actually said, which was the perception of and response to the increase. My apologies. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
tbf, I didn't state the psychological thesis up front either :)
No they aren't
They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit
They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.
The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.
> No they aren't
You literally said they are building data centers to cater to demand later on in your own comment:
> If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built
There you go. Your own point debunked by your own words.
> They aren't benevolently trying to help you out
I didn't say anything about the owners building stuff out of charity or benevolence. Are you responding to the wrong comment? Yours is more-or-less irrelevant to mine in addition to being self-contradictory.
> The fact that it (building data centers) also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant
It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built
Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards
> It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built
...and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant. Do you understand what relevance means? It means that there's meaning, implication. You haven't given a single follow-on implication from that hypothesis that actually matters to the discussion.
> Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards
No, this is just factually false.
Fact: for datacenters, without market demand, without a buyer, shareholder value cannot possibly be generated.
So, first there is a market, and then companies act on it to generate shareholder value.
You're living in a world detached from reality where "shareholder value" exists as its own separate entity that can generate market demand.
You need to take a high-school level economics course so that you don't make objectively incorrect statements like this.
If you think people's motivations are irrelevant then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing
the questions are 1) who is footing the bill and 2) who is benefiting from that economic activity
if it's not the local community, then why should they agree to it much less pay for some of it
If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.
Instead Altman says it will destroy the world: https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-sam-altman...
So it's bad for the world according to its proponents, and at the same time, a bad neighbour? Why would anyone not vote against it given those?
Datacenter is not bringing more economic activity to the area.
That’s a great thing.
If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!
And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.
Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.
/s
Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.
I'd imagine it's something like each American eating half as many cheeseburgers a year would offset all current and projected emissions from DC energy usage.
(now you have two planning permission problems!)
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
It's always convenient for you when someone else has to make sacrifices to their job security, housing, financial future, and comfort in order to save the environment, when you get to enjoy all the perks of their sacrifice, without needing to make any equivalent sacrifices yourself.
I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?
Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.
Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.
My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.
In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.
Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.
I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.
>We all share this world.
Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.
>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?
Your other points are generally very well-thought-out, but this one is not.
Grid expansions take years. Building new nuclear power plants takes decades. And there's "slack" in the sense that utility prices can raise substantially before there's actually impetus to start planning a grid expansion, and then you still have to wait years for construction to finish.
And the party that takes the hit for those sustained elevated electricity prices is local residents, who in general have far less capital and are disproportionally hurt by it relative to the owns of the data centers.
You can make the argument that the electricity price increases are going to be lower than most people think and wouldn't meaningfully hurt the average local resident, but that's a separate argument. I don't buy that "if it pulls power from the grid that's a good thing" is valid.
If there isn't enough power to meet demand, then build out the grid first, or tax datacenter power consumption so that the inflection pain-point before grid capacity expands is less harmful to the residents.
Now, I'd argue that building has turbines have negative environmental effects, but that's a separate matter.
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?
Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.
> This is economic growth and a good thing.
Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.
What on earth is this "If I get in a car accident, it's actually a good thing because I get to buy a new, better car" logical reasoning?
It'd be like your widget maker harvesting wood for their widgets from public land and exhausting it so the public is left without this resource, then expecting the public to pay to arrange for more wood to be grown to replace the wood they used up.
(Farms don’t employ many people either.)
I can't eat the output of a data center, though.
I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.
Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.
The point is that something tangible is produced.
Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue? I am skeptical because typically these projects receive tax payer money.
> Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC
A nuclear power plant takes 6-10 years to build in the US, and sometimes even longer.
According to the county FAQ: https://www.boxeldercountyut.gov/661/Stratos-Page-FAQ-Page
> What tax revenue is expected?
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
"Could" generate 108 million a year
Naw man. These numbers need to be more concrete upfront. This sounds like "under ideal conditions (that we won't ever achieve)" weasling
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.
And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.
Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.
AFAIK recent data centers are all either:
1. connected to the existing grid, or
2. using natural gas generators
There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.
Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.
The issue with incremental problems and quantity problems is you can't point at a single one and go "here, here is the problem" (at least most of the time), you have to look at the entire problem and go "Shit, the paperclip maximizer building one paperclip isn't an issue, it's turning everything into paperclips that's the issue".
And that's where we are.
(ghost of Bastiat laughs in the distance)
Yeah, from natgas right? Or maybe diesel generators? Or are they building one of the practically nonexistent green energy data centers?
Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property. I'm just happy we're getting such a good deal out of this.
When there is political will we can absolutely restrict people from doing things with their property. This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
Whether the political will in your specific case has reached that point is another issue, but in many cases it seems to be approaching that level, especially where existing or proposed developments seem like they will directly impact the community that's already there.
You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.
There is also the increase in cost of borrowing for everyone. Going this fast is just insane.
This is just another way of saying "no data centers can be built". The people who want to build data centers don't care what it's powered by, but they choose gas turbines over wind & solar because renewables can't handle the power demands.
On a meta-level, it's terrible politics for tech companies to roll out a technology that many don't see a need for and fear will take away their livelihood, while at the same time increasing CO2 emissions because renewables are too hard. Of course this course of action runs into massive opposition.
I get generalized anxiety about pace of progress, but then let’s have that discussion rather than the canards about water or noise (which can be real in some cases, but taking GP at their word that’s not the case here).
This is the crux. It's different because data centers are illegally operating gas turbines. If CVS were playing loud music all night every night, nobody would doubt the ability of local law enforcement to shut it down. That is not true of (specifically) AI data centers, so it is rational to reject them until law enforcement gains the ability to police them.
It sounds like they'd be using the natural gas pipeline they would generate from starts in Opal, Wyoming (goes all the way to Oregon), and that the company behind it was in huge amounts of debt and filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.
So at a glance, I'm curious if making it profitable might be helpful to everyone, but would need someone with more info to chime in before I could say that.
You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.
I think people would be more open to the data center buildout if the data center projects built their own clean energy infrastructure
The nuclear will get delayed. Always does.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.
The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.
It uses less water than many other things, too, I'm sure.
But the farm made food. What does the data center create that humans need to survive?
Discovery of Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductors: https://www.vals.ai/blogs/room-temperature-magnetic-semicond...
Diagnoses of things multiple accomplished doctors could not do: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kaw3cv/chatgpt_di...
And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.
Seriously what’s peoples problem?
This is one of those situations where HN is too smart and thinks logic is the same as reality. Life exists outside of computers
From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.
If their concerns had been acted on to begin with, most of the existing data centers would never have been built as people would be using computing technology under their own control rather than authoritarian-by-design "cloud" traps. So I have little sympathy for the surveillance industry now that the jig is nearly up.
also you
* "A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center."
* "I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me."
First, maybe they don't trust the company doing the development, or Kevin Oleary. What they are saying may or may not be true, but if they've made a habit of being casual with the truth or not following through on their word it doesn't really matter, does it?
That is tough, and it is why it's so important to maintain one's reputation.
Second, I seem to recall Oleary running around to news outlets telling anyone with a camera that the only reason that anyone would oppose the project was if they were somehow working with the PRC and trying to hurt America.
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?" is a very valid thing you said, and I actually respect it. If, instead, I said something like, "you are just tool of Elon Musk and AI has tricked you" it would probably feel insulting and you would be predisposed be hostile to me.
I think the way the project was done was disrespectful to other people in the area. Ultimately, laws and the voting process will handle it as it should be. If the project can be relied on to bring the benefits without causing the harm that you claim it will, it should be a slam dunk case.
Third, people are concerned about economic security and loss from AI and this specific project can't escape it. Our field has made its own bed there. These concern are valid and public statements by the involved CEOs and large scale layoffs can't be easily dismissed.
So the farm is no longer there? As in it is using zero water right now?
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Serious doubt. They will use whichever is cheaper, and that's going to be the grid.
That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.
The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.
Am I allowed to think less of people who vote for stuff like mandatory prayer in schools, even if it is their community and their right to vote for what they want?
The HN crashout over people suddenly disliking hyperscalers for some reason is something you could only witness here.
A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise
Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"
As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.
Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?
That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?
The joke there is that states can't agree to a thing about that watershed and also don't seem to look beyond it when they are making rules. That apparently includes my own tunnel vision.
How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.
In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.
I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.
This is the crux of the whole thing is it not? People want money into their communities and even more into their pockets:
https://nationalsecurity.virginia.edu/research/what-american...
But not everything turns out fine:
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/richland-p...
Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.
A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.
> "Noise"
Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.
> "Wildlife refuge"
I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.
These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.
The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.
Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception
What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?
The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.
The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?
You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?
You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.
You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.
I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
I don't know much about this, but isn't Stratos ultimately planned to be 9GW, or 250x the size of your 36MW DC? Even if it doesn't scale proportionally, it's not hard to see it get to 100 people.
You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.
You're still wrong about the job creation benefits. But if this is really, verifiably true it sounds like a good deal.
But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.
>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.
>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.
I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.
I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"
At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.
That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.
My Hatian neighbors who do gig economy stuff and are totally not running a car dismantling operation on the side would absolutely benefit if all the people who complain about them and are the driving political force behind the rules used to harass them were disempowered and impoverished.
I think they're a pretty extreme example but you see people in situations like this all across the blue collar economy.
How much?
Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".
Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?
Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers: * Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc). * Massive economic destabilization and disruption * Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility * Wars and international conflict * Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry * Takeover by governments, use by threat actors * A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.
WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."
And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.
Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.
Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.
Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.
In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.
I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.
In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.
Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.
ps. Have never used tiktok
Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.
You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for
i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm
Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.
If you think Flock cameras are bad, you have no idea the kind of surveillance the Chinese government uses on their people.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped trying to help people help themselves. Instead, I just watch and close my door in their face when they beg for help.
Maybe people who don’t quite like that should be more articulate about it rather than using seeming post hoc reasoning like “water”? I don’t know. In my experience the bar for frustrated-five-on-the-street is quite high if they want to avoid an aww-shucks this voting bloc and their social medias.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621575/thereversecenta...
AI companies don't exactly try to hide the fact that their end goal is replacing all human jobs.
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
[1] https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#3-eco...
[2] https://eletric-vehicles.com/tesla/tesla-q2-earnings-here-ar...
[3] all on X, https://x.com/sama
Or Microsoft's AI chief's "I think we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So, white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer — either being, you know, a lawyer, or an accountant, or a project manager, or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Or Dario's "software engineering will be fully automated in 12 months" or "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs"
Or Altman's “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me... On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”
Either you've been living under a rock, or you're pretending to be ignorant.
https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/anthropic-ceo-warning-ai-job-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go...
> And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
— Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891
i mentioned it in my comment too
> Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners.
i am not conviced that markzuckerberg stays up all night building datacenters so he can pass on that wealth to you.
That's unfortunate, as manual labor will be the only thing left if AI companies have their way.
The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.
You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
If they have a grid connection, they are going to take power from the grid when cheaper than generating power.
2. I’m anti-data center. I think at some point, you pull the levers you have? I think the tech industry is too consolidated and wields too much power, and the whole data center buildout has been done under a shroud of secrecy.
I think it’s rational to pull the levers you have, when the industry is predicting something close to the apocalypse.
Yes it’s mostly vibes, but until the industry stops acting like fucking nutters. I’m voting on vibes.
The policy-informed theory of How The Rich Are Irrationally Hated.
Also these buildings will be abandoned within the next couple years as models move more towards the edge.
All farming should be stopped immediately and converted to data centres, then we’ll have unlimited water!
Some farming should indeed be stopped, and we would have more water. Farming is not an unmitigated food, no matter how sarcastic you are.
Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.
And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.
"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.
EDIT: I looked it up, not surprisingly, you're really shading the truth here. This is the barn, yes? So it looks like what happened is that the township denied the application for the DC, the developer sued, and the township cut a deal to let the DC go through, with a 50% cut to their tax bill for 12 years. Then the value of the DC went up dramatically, because AI, and the township tried to claim that the tax cut was for 50% of the original value when they approved the tax cut, not 50% of the property value when the tax is due. Their own attorney told them that was bullshit, so they eventually dropped it.
This is like if a store gives you a coupon for 50% off and then you take it in to redeem it a few months later and they've quadrupled their prices, and they try to tell you the coupon actually means 50% off of what their prices were when you got the coupon. Ridiculous.
I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.
There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?
It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.
If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck
comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation
There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities
* We've built a technology that has obliterated entry level hiring
* That technology might obliterate all the other "normal" person white collar jobs. The kinds of jobs you can clock in and out and not think about them outside of that. Instead, every new job will be a managerial one working with 500 agents.
* Loaning all the money to build these data centers and train these models costs so much it cranks rates through the roof, so we've frozen the real estate market and nobody can move or buy in
* The past 10 years of American politics have been defined by how the last time we did a broad replacement of labor event like that for a group of people. Their standard of living permanently shrunk (the NAFTA disrupted working class), and we may end up doing that to you guys again. The only solution is that the government is going to have to do some sort of UBI or redistribution (which the last time they did during COVID, it was followed by the greatest inflation we've seen in our lifetimes)
* This technology might literally destroy the world in the next 10 years, and we keep accidentally releasing it into the world like its Skynet. But we are not responsible for it, and by the way its unavoidable with this technology. Somewhere on the other side, utopia will arise (No really your standard of living will actually go up after losing your job this time unlike everyone else, trust me.)
Then half the people in this thread is smugly are acting baffled at why people don't want this, and going "Hey they don't know that much about data center logistics but still oppose this. What is up with that?." Forget about if a data center actually ends up being a net drag if its near you and the standard nimby stuff. Even if it weren't, what benefit does marching towards this future have for anybody not in the top 10%? Sure, you can make a bunch of economic theory arguments: growth is always good, stagflation, Luddites, etc. But in practice, economic advancement and technology over the past 30 years has advanced so fast people can't even comprehend it, and in return everybody is becoming stupider, more unhappy, polarized, and the median standard of living has dropped as rich people have 20x their net worth. Why would a normal person want more of this?
For this framing to work, you need a base of reliable supporters already all-in on your cause regardless of how you actually perform, and the data center proponents have done virtually everything imaginable the last four years to drive people away. Why AI investors are shocked (shocked) is really beyond explicable reason; American on both teams have never responded well to this kind of brain-dead gambit.
Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better. They are deeply skeptical that future gains will be freely shared with them rather than horded by a few tech oligarchs. Based on pretty much all of modern history, they're right to be skeptical.
This is apparently incomprehensible to many AI proponents, but many people would genuinely rather live next to a farm than a data center. They don't care that you can vibe code a hobby project or a jira ticket 10x faster than before. They do want cheaper utilities and a secure economic position, and they are well aware that AI is providing the opposite for them.
Tech is now viewed in the same lense as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"
Anytime I talk to anyone not in tech they're extremely sceptical of anything tech companies do. Most common reasons I hear as to why is greed, social media destroying children in many ways, seeking political power, and now many parents are concerned their child won't have critical thinking skills because AI is here to think for them.
I don't think they're crazy or obviously wrong. It breaks my heart to hear tech leaders chalk this all up to "AI has poor messaging" as if you say "Our lies have got to be better so we can make the public believe what we want". I've never seen tech so out of touch.
That's right, but consider what people would be saying about oil companies on Driller News. Thousands of users here have financial or ideological vested interests in the success of the current crop of tech companies. They can recognize the individual faults of the industry where it doesn't affect their primary interest - such as disliking social media, addictive design and so on - but when you start talking about THE tech golden goose, the criticism dies down.
This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.
Got any proof for that statement?
A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.
I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.
Oh I see, I didn't realize it was so simple. Let's meet back in a week and we can compare my backyard solar + battery demonstration to your nuclear demonstration.
Tech “ownership models” have accelerated the separation of haves and have nots. I’ve wondered if datacenters were regulated such that they become public goods (libraries, power and water infra, etc), if the public would invest more agreeably in them.
Just policy thinking out loud.
And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”
Most people feel like they have no say in anything that is going on because a handful of insanely large tech companies are just deciding the future for everyone, and it's in their own best interest- not the best interest of the poeple.
As someone who grew up in a country with near zero growth (some would call it “sustainable growth”) and the resultant stagflation, I wouldn’t wish that feeling of growing into an economy where you can only aspire to take from others, on my worst enemies.
I agree with these voters on almost everything, from the need for more energy and water infrastructure to using this growth to pay for basic needs like healthcare. But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
It seems like we are habituating the American public to just reject that and hope it goes somewhere else (tm) while they get the gains and that’s not how this works.
And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but that should be highly counter-intuitive. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor; society entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive work as well as increase unemployment is quite likely. My prediction is based on 'what comes next' but if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month, this is all going to be, again understandably, seen as pie in the sky.
If this is true wouldn’t it be nice if the municipal budget had some room to manouver? [1]
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2026/09/19/700-bill...
I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.
They’re literally bringing jobs and paying out the ass, the unions love em [1] and absolutely supercharging local tax revenue, just basic economic growth stuff.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/opinion/data-centers-elec...
This is the doublespeak that has the public so distrustful: value companies at billions and trillions of dollars based primarily on their ability to replace your workforce, then tell the workforce there will be no displacement. It's insults the intelligence of reasonable people.
Example; my son’s teacher uses AI to make new reading material (mostly graphics), he’s pretty good at keeping quality up and making things relevant to the kids’ real life. But critically without AI, he would not have otherwise hired an illustrator, this is wholesale new economic activity. Not a replacement.
Outside of marketing hype, this is what is mostly happening across the economy. No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.
It's easy to skip out on AI when you are a waitress or cashier.
It's mostly just a punchline for stuff once you step outside of HN and such..
Also known as China, future world superpower. They have enough political continuity to formulate a strategy at national scale and execute on it.
It's crazy how they just keep winning while the US and democracies the world over keep shooting themselves in the foot.
> while they get the gains
The gains continue to flow into the US... For now. I wonder how long that'll last.
Maybe it looks like a reduction in monopolies, increased competition, lowering of prices as automation pays dividends, and a general de-consolidation of power.
It doesn't look like 4-companies owning the whole stock market and incumbents using AI to cut every worker they can with no longterm plan, using AI to deny insurance claims, and rig the deck in the most unconscionable uncompetitive ways they can.
There are outcomes much worse than "flat" if we aren't careful, and even the AI CEOs say as much.
There is absolutely no need for cranes to show up in or near existing neighborhoods to build data centers. The US is not out of remote land that would be well suited for this purpose, but building in those places requires spending more money to build supporting infrastructure, so businesses prefer to avoid that cost.
If the growth is truly beneficial, it should be able to pay for itself, and I think that is what people want to see enforced.
That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.
They don’t need more than a handful of people to operate.
For the record, I don't think this is necessarily a positive development for our field or the US. But the solution was one or two years in the past and involved more truthful and principled behavior by the companies developing these projects.
This election speaks for itself in terms of how the population feels about the matter.
As I pointed out, I lived in a country that answered this question exactly like you wanted. It was like living in a country where every institution from the college to the coffee shop was the DMV. It works..just about. But it sucks.
For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.
Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.
Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.
This doesn't happen when UPS opens a distribution center or CVS opens a store because everybody knows UPS and CVS are bound by local laws. That cannot be said of e.g. SpaceX, so the only play is to keep them out, full stop. Nobody wants a neighbor who is above the law.
Very few people know, or care, about AI companies in any way.
I guess the lesson multinationals learned from the 2008 financial crisis is that if you fail is better to fail really really really big.
Obviously there would be knock on effects of a major crash that are hard to predict, but people inside the AI bubble wildly overrate how invested most Americans are in their success.
That's how things should work. Bailouts are socialism for corporations.
AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.
And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.
Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.
Dump truck divers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, and many other construction trades were benefiting within a 2-hour radius of the site.
Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities. Clearly they must be built correctly, but the cash injection to workers pockets must be a welcomed addition to local families.
When the data center is built and the dump trucks leave, what is the ongoing benefit for that community?
What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development with similar land and resource use? It seems to me that datacenters have low ongoing employment requirements compared to those resources used, and that many of the benefits of running the datacenter aren't gained by the local community but rather by businesses located far away.
Is there another group that's lining up to build stuff on that land? Should nobody ever be allowed to build on any land unless it's being used to the maximum possible utility?
A household can’t compete with a data center on electricity/ water prices. So households will have to pay more.
- Every existing data center just became much more valuable
- If "data centers in space" actually work then their value just grew significantly
Anyone with the care to pay attention to what is going on realizes that the pushback on DCs has nothing to do with DCs, and everything to do with fear about AI.
yeah, from tiktok no less.
There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
edit: let me add that the price of natural gas in TX is effectively zero.. or may even be negative. There's plenty of energy available. Now, availability of turbines to convert those chemical bonds to eletricity is another matter but the gas is there.
Are companies proposing steel mills and semiconductor fabs directly adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods?
Will those developments pay for the required infrastructure expansions, or get special deals to waive those costs in return for building in that community?
But also just NIMBY. No one likes to live near industry.
To get this big a backlash, you need a variety of reasons to oppose that appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Inevitably some of those reasons will be silly (a lot of people talked themselves into voting for a 2nd term for Trump, after all!).
> “You guys have made your point, okay,” Nab tells the local residents.
> “But we have to live with this now!” they urgently respond.
> “Oh, ya have to live with it?” Nab shoots back, smirking as he speaks.
> “Yes we do!” the locals reply, as other townies chime in. At one point, a security guard jumps in and warns everyone to act like “adults.”
The near open mocking of residents as they grapple with persistent noise is what bends me the wrong way.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/resident-screec...
[1] https://www.wkyt.com/2026/10/29/carroll-county-residents-pla...
NVDA is down a couple %, ORCL is mostly flat. It’s the neoclouds that have taken the most beating, down 10%+
I wonder if people know who the data centers are for…
It's amazing to me that no matter how seemingly "smart" tech oligarchs are, they don't realize that you actually have to incentivize people to do the things you want by making it benefit THEM. You can't just go "Oh, this is good for society so you need to take one for the team!" Nobody believes that BS anymore. When have the oligarchs themselves ever "taken one for the team?"
Now they will just need to build datacenters in more remote areas, and pay for the infrastructure themselves. Personally I've always been a fan of building them on old oil rigs or stuff like that because there's no point in wasting fresh water to cool these things when seawater is almost as good.
But my main takeaway remains that it's just wild how BAD tech oligarchs are at understanding the psychology and motivations of the public. You'd think that when a group of voters can absolutely destroy you and everything you worked for just by passing the right legislation, you'd put in some effort to understand their mindset and incentives. But these people seem to spend all their time in their own echo chambers. Maybe in a twist of irony, their social media algorithms tell them only want they want to hear so they have no idea how much the general public hates them.
On the bright side, here's a politician who can keep their promise.
> benefit from the loss of jobs
This will only benefit some part of the present ruling-class (and partially some of their tech-minions putting those policies in effect)
Some near me have wetlands around them and the houses bordering them are very desirable.
Seems like some bad apples ruined it for everyone.
This is not going to affect small businesses.
Even something relatively innocuous like an orange grove. Rented a house in one before. Peaceful most of the time, free citrus. But when it got too cold they’d burn diesel in these little tower things and run a wind machine (like a giant reverse windmill) that was loud as fuck all night.
Had some relatives that lived near some kind of paper pulping plant. Guess if that sucked or not?
Now that I think about it, the local environment not smelling like absolute shit is probably a relatively recent development.
I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.
Data Centers on the Ballot
https://datacentersontheballot.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50361608)
Drake Yes: Green compute sanctuaries
Bet me this isn’t just going to be a PR issue.
Private compounds owned by billionaires who believe data centers are the best. Seems to me, they already have a solution to their problem.
In my local area, there's routinely local opposition to substations built due to growing residential demand and water infrastructure facility build.
They're old boomers who don't want anything built, especially not if it will economically benefit their children.
The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.
BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.
Tax breaks are usually at the state level, towns get paid out, which is why so many towns were rubber stamping approvals so quickly.
That's aside from the build-out jobs.
Anyone who works anywhere close to data center build including construction, networking, sysadmin is cleaning up right now. Their wages have doubled and demand is huge.
Maybe it is 100 permanent jobs, but that's huge for a small community, and the thousands of temporary jobs make an impact, too.
But current prices typically assume powerful NIMBYs blocking new development.
That and even Gavin himself got on the pulpit to preach how it was poorly drafted and shouldn’t be passed. I legitimately don’t think I saw a single person or advertisement for it, you’re the first.
Political choices have trade-offs. We have to give up some things to gain others.
But somehow politicians get away with promising to solve all problems all at once, even though that's clearly impossible.
The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.
There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.
One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.
Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.
The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!
Smart phone or other things this sentence is usually trotted out for not so much.
Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical?
Common pattern:
"I'm campaigning against A."
"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."
"I don't care!"
The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.