More than 100 rally against data centers at Michigan Capitol | Hacker News Reader

More than 100 rally against data centers at Michigan Capitol

lansingstatejournal.com

81 pointsrmason92 comments

If I could give any advice to the people planning those data centers, they've got it all wrong. They assume that since they're noisy that we will plop them smack in the middle of some good farm land, surround them with corn fields and it solves the noise problem.

In Michigan cities there is plenty of vacant land. Thousands of acres of vacant land. Here in Lansing the old GM owns two large plots where factories stood stamping out Oldsmobile's. There is all the power you would ever need. They're surrounded by other factories making possibly more noise than even a data centers fans. A small business community that has been decimated by the GM employees business in the neighborhood leaving.

So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.

Can someone correct me if I am wrong?

The noise problem is caused by fans (air cooling). Data centers cooled by water do not have noisy fans. My understand is modern data center designs use close loop water systems, eliminating noise and water table issues.

Closed loop water requires air fans.

You are correct the one that I referenced in Lansing's entertainment district is water cooled. They do not point out in newspaper accounts one of the reasons for its location there is they're supplying the heated water to the towns steam district. That heated water could possibly migrate chances of a electricity rate increase.

But as several data center engineers I have spoken to agreed with me that if it was put on one of the many empty parking lots West of the Capitol it would be surrounded by mostly empty government buildings where a majority of state workers are working from home. They would still be able to access the steam district.

If it's true closed loop (i.e. no water evaporation to cool the loop) then how are they cooling the radiators without fans?

Honestly, if there is a place it would have made sense to do evaporative cooling it was probably Michigan anyways... but I hope the closed loop option ends up working out just as well.

Unfortunately no.

Evaporative cooling works best in low humidity areas. That's why it's so often deployed in deserts.

Most data centers use evaporative cooling towers, actually. Adding them into a cooling loop almost doubles the efficiency, it’s a no-brainer.

Nothing in the article talks about noise pollution. Their concern is about resource usage - water and electricity.

Is water an issue in Michigan? I thought they have plenty of water.

They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.

Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.

Sure. With the suggestion of locating them on the sites of old factories: how does data center water usage compare to the factories?

> over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.

So, basically none?

Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY.

700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.

500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year.

We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.

The beef water quote is assuming the cattle are being fed irrigated crops. If you graze cattle on land you don't irrigate or feed cattle corn in places where you don't irrigate did you use thousands of gallons per animal or zero?

>700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.

You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading.

My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation.

It rains. That's it.

Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain.

700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales)

It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.

I don't think 2 feet of irrigation per year is an outrageous claim, certainly you see that in western Kansas, and maybe half that amount in Nebraska. In California we need 2-3 feet per year, but California only has a small fraction of corn land compared to the corn belt states. And yes, that is stupid, but isn't that the point of this thread? People do outrageous stuff with water all over America to a far larger extent than anyone is proposing to do with data centers.

I'm somewhere south-ish in the US- We get the same amount of rain, but in torrents over a couple hours every 6 weeks with triple digit temperatures in between.

So, nothing disingenuous or even really ignorant on my part- just the idea that consistent rainfall can be trusted so much that crop failure due to no rain is an acceptable risk is alien enough it didn't cross my mind... Especially when I was mainly trying to put it in perspective. People space out when Billions come into play. So, I find comparisons with a factor <100 more digestible, and thought I'd share.

You're missing the point. We don't irrigate. 80% of corngrowers don't irrigate.

We don't have the irrigation hardware, we don't have the wells to irrigate, there is no irrigation.

It's an outrageous claim because it's false.

The folks who do irrigate corn more than a foot per year shouldn't be allowed. It is a huge unnecessary waste of water and we aren't lacking for corn production.

At least your stance on this topic is internally consistent, setting you apart from most of the commentariat. For that, I salute you.

As you have established, eastern Nebraska and western Iowa have an abundance of rain, surface water, and shallow aquifers. Would you then agree that it is a perfectly appropriate place for data centers?

Data centers just shouldn't be using groundwater as a heat sink, regardless of where. That is an inappropriate usage of a natural resource.

The Ogallala aquifer is dropping considerably and geological processes happen which means even if you stop pulling water out of it it never restores. The most wasteful usages of it (growing corn where it has no business being grown where the majority of the water must come out of the acquirer, data centers that cool from the aquifer, etc) need to be curtailed.

Just because a small minority of people grow corn in the near desert doesn't mean that ALL corn grown is wasteful. Environmental enthusiasts lie with statistics they don't understand and as a result you don't get good environmental policy because too few people who actually understand the situation care to make reasonable choices.

Eating beef pastured on naturally watered land and unirrigated corn has a much different environmental impact than cattle grown on semi-arid-irrigated corn. If you just have "america beef fuk yah" vs. "save muh envroments!" it's just meaningless sectarian strife between fools.

This makes sense to me. I also don't think that data centers or anyone else should draw down fossil aquifers that never recharge[1]. But that wasn't what I asked. In data center country, the eastern Nebraska / western Iowa area that is thick with major data centers, the aquifers are alluvial. They are above the Ogallala, and they are tied to the Missouri River. They are a renewable resource and I see no problem with utilizing their water for human purposes.

1: A good book about this is "Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains"

Wouldn’t a water treatment plant solve this, so water can be reused and they aren’t pumping it out of the ground, using it for cooling briefly, then dumping it? This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.

>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.

They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.

Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.

It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)

Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.

>Plenty of water and cold,

People say the same thing about Michigan, yet, here we are

Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages)

The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.

Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.

There aren't any roads to Nunavut, much less fat fiber pipes and gigawatts of electricity.

How do you capture and treat evaporated water? That is where data centers lose water, through evaporative cooling towers.

Get rid of the cooling towers and condense the water, then treat like normal. Or put it into a closed loop with a radiator.

These are solved problems, I assume it’s just a question of cost and short-term vs long-term thinking.

It seems almost criminal that there are still so many people without safe water, and we’re using billions of gallons for temporary cooling of data centers, just to let it evaporate off.

Using a data center as a heat source for desalination may be another idea, where instead of data centers using fresh water, they could produce it. I looked into it briefly and it sounds like some universities and companies are exploring this. Instead of these data centers causing problems people want to avoid, they could solve problems people already have.

Evaporative cooling towers would be fine if it were a closed loop, the amount evaporated isn't worth that much concern. They're dumping ALL of the water that they intake after using it once. The evaporative or other cooling methods are just to lessen the environmental impact of dumping hot water back into the environment.

It does but there is only a chance their usage will be benign depending on location and how much volume of the natural water they are going to be artificially heating. That heat has to go somewhere and more places than not could be overwhelmed because it was cheaper and more convenient to suck up 3/4 of a local stream to heat rather than pipe out deep into one of the lakes.

Also Michigan isn't perpetually wet, the summers can get dry at times which means natural sources slow down and ground water recedes and data centers can't/won't scale down utilization based on seasonal conditions. If they end up relying on pulling from ground water, they might not see any limits or problems on their time scales, but 20 years down the road when the local's natural springs and artesian wells stop performing they might get pissed.

All that said, Michigan is pretty good at trying to protect its water, and I expect there to be a decent amount of pushback and opposition to any irresponsible planning with regards to water usage. But on the other hand, we do have a number of corrupt politicians which a big tech company could easily line the pockets of.

As a Michigan resident, I can’t agree more. Also areas like Flint and Pontiac are in need of jobs and economic development.

Data centers create some construction jobs while they are being built but not much after that. A few people to keep an eye on things, swap out failed equipment, accept deliveries.

Google's data center complex in Council Bluffs, IA is one of the largest in the world and it employs ... 250 people excluding temporary construction/expansion jobs.

Are those all Google employees, or does 250 also include long-term on-site contractors? I'm thinking security, maintenance, janitorial, etc

Adds about the same number of jobs as single Costco, except this particular Costco will increase your electricity bill even if you don't work there.

I think the news is misleading people on the number of jobs it will create. I mentioned data centers not creating many jobs to my dad, a news junkie in Michigan, and he said he read it would create over 1k jobs. That must have been including temporary construction jobs.

Three shifts of 300 people to monitor and fix things. Maybe 4 shifts because of weekends.

These things don't really supply "jobs" in any sort of way that is noticeable to the surrounding community. A couple hundred people. The idea that DCs produce jobs is basically a false hope given these communities.

Well, at least a DC fills vacant lots that might otherwise attract crime.

I don't know what realistic alternative the residents have in mind, but I'd say even a few jobs is better than the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.

> DC fills vacant lots that might otherwise attract crime.

Can we prove that the location of this DC is attracting crime? It's not a vacant lot. This protest is because DTE is expected to raise electric rates for the state's residents, so you're costing the local economy in aggregate more than the jobs that the DC is even providing. It's not guaranteed, if almost likely not, to be a net positive on the whole versus the zero-case of a "vacant lot".

> the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.

I'm asking this genuinely: have you been to Michigan? The entire state is certainly not some sort of industrial wasteland and a lot of people equate the state to the Urbex porn of the shell of Detroit. This is planned in the state capital's entertainment district, not some semi-abandoned factory area.

Most of the state I've seen has been mostly nature, some sand dunes, and woods.

Only the xAI ones are noisy because they (illegally?) used mobile generators to meet electricity needs

Are you suggesting the people who plan data centres are stupid and/or not profit maximising?

> Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.

There will be few jobs created after construction is complete, and the ones created won't pay anything like typical tech comp.

Maybe you should calibrate your definition of what "typical tech comp" means and what roles that applies to, and at what companies.

Median US Salary for a Data Center Technician is around 80k.

Median US Salary is $63,360.

Median household income is around $75,763 (Detroit CSA #s).

There's a lot of people out of work right now.

How many people work in a modern data center?

Only as many as are needed to physically rack the hardware and do hand-on maintenance. The people actually using the servers shouldn’t be located on-site.

A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time.

They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.

How much will the local energy prices rise due to the datacenter? More than that offset by the employees they hire I bet.

Most people will be very happy with a fraction of the typical tech comp if they have a job.

Most people who need a job won't have that job at that data center.

I have known what kind of jobs a data center needs. Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?

> Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?

They're not software engineers or data scientists if that's what you mean by "highly qualified".

Datacenters techs do the physical parts of the job we once called "system administrator". That definitely requires skill and attention to detail, not just the ability to "install some parts".

When the tech industry transitioned from on site systems to datacenters and big compute / big data, "system administrator" got split into "site reliability engineer" and "datacenter technician" as they scaled independently, with datacenter tech being focused on manufacturing and physical troubleshooting.

They have always been the "blue collar" workers of tech, both in terms of pay and prestige. Like tech support, the job is considered more of a stepping stone into the operations (not R&D) side of big data companies.

That all said, the qualifications of applicants for a job depend a lot on the labor market, in particular, the desperation of applicants. During the dotcom bust, a lot of CS grads (including me) were applying for technician jobs.

I'd imagine it's because dragging the fiber to middle of nowhere can be pretty expensive

Worry about the leg-thick power cable not the pinky-thin fiber. The cost of the fiber itself basically doesn't matter relative to a data center itself.

I see that you know nothing about anything involved. The cost of cable is essentially irrelevant in both cases, the "everything else" is the expensive part.

Power can be had from the closest high voltage line (and maybe even easier to get outside of the city)

The fiber have to be dragged from either nearest point of presence (a building with many fiber connections coming to it from multiple companies to exchange traffic), or to whatever dark fiber infrastructure is available nearby.

In city, that's usually not that hard, ISPs already "plumbed" most of the bigger cities with fiber infrastructure.

Middle of the boonies, where we want the datacenters to go ? Dig, dig dig, get permissions for digging, get permission from everything around the ride from city's fiber infrastructure to the place in middle of nowhere, months or years in getting permissions, and red tape anywhere. There is probably some power close enough, or at the very least you can find a location close to power, but location close to fiber will if anything be some existing industrial centre, and even that might not be a sure bet. You might get lucky and get a permission to use existing poles to drag some fiber on them, but it's still PITA

They are talking gigawatt. That pretty much implies dedicated long-distance transmission lines. The 1.4 GW they mention are very close to the full output of three mile island. This is not a small power situation that is done with existing power lines. And the moment you drag power in from 20+ miles away, you might as well just put fiber in there as it seems very easy given by how prevalent it is for long distance lines these past decade or two.

Genuine question - are DCs really that noisy from outside? If so what is the source of the noise?

Anecdata, but I was once on a tour of a colocation DC. Located in Vegas, near the old town in a basement of some office building. Completely unassuming from the outside. Inside it was a little loud, but not terribly so. Busy street level noise maybe.

Cooling system.

In some cases on-site natural gas generators have been used and those do make a lot of noise

I worked in a small DC (I think it had about 10k servers at its peak). The only time there was noise outside was if the generators were running due to an extended power outage or maintenance. We had a few trailer generators that were added on as capacity increased. Where I worked was right on the other side of the wall to one of the computer rooms and I don’t recall hearing anything. It only got loud when the door was physically opened to walk in the room, that noise was mostly from fans.

I also toured one of our larger data centers, and even inside the small cube farm area it felt like a normal office. The noise only picked up once inside the room with the servers.

Noise during construction would probably be worse than noise during operation.

Part of the stop-gap plan of the White House is for DCs to run those backup generators at peak hours. That would be for years until the new power plants get online.

The real estate is usually purchased only after the following requirements are assured, and there are many: Local and regional power grid robustness which includes: ability to service long-term capacity commitments, whether the developer will need to invest in and build substations themselves, and the legality and availability for on-site power generation (natural gas or electric). All of those requirements generally come after an assessment of local and state government appetite and willingness to cut red tape for such deals and provide favorable environmental policy.

Why would any company making data centers care about where they put them if the worst push back they get is less people than the company they employed to make sure janitors aren’t real employees of theirs, show up to protest?

They have no reason to change their behavior because no one has caused them enough pain to change their behavior.

> So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.

The site of the old GM Fisher Body plant is a sixty acres brownfield. The proposed downtown data center location is a one acre unused parking lot. It is close enough to LBWL, Lansing's utility company for water/electricity, to reuse the generated heat [1].

I don't think this really compares to the 270 acres data center for OpenAi/Oracle planned in Saline Township, which will be connected to one of the few 345kV transmission lines in Michigan. [2]

[1] https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-gree...

[2] https://openinframap.org/#11.64/42.1244/-83.8008

How is "more than 100" people "rallying" even remotely newsworthy? What's the threshold, three?

there are dozens of us !

Three people could be a group of friends. More than 100 is clearly different.

Given that there are usually _zero_ people rallying in Lansing, this is notable enough for the local newspaper.

Since the population is around 112k-114k people that would be around 111,900 people didn’t rally on the low end.

Lol, I prefer that version of the headline:

"99.9% of residents did not show up to protest new datacenters in Michigan"

You could use that same statistic for literally every protest ever, doesn't mean they're not worth the causes

> What's the threshold, three?

The threshold is an organization organizing it. Getting 100 people out demonstrates your political power to your supporters and the people you seek to influence. Getting 1,000 people demonstrates that you have more of it.

if you read the article instead of just criticizing the headline:

> They listened to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticizing the lack of transparency with DTE, the utility that's associated with the Saline Township proposal, and legislators who protested tax breaks for data center projects.

> ...

> "We're talking about 1.4 gigawatts, which is, of course, enough to provide energy to a city of a million people," Nessel said. "I think we should be taking this extremely seriously, don't you? Do you guys trust DTE? Do you trust Open AI? Do we trust Oracle to look out for our best interests here in Michigan?"

this wasn't just a random group of 100 people, they were organized enough to get the state AG as well as multiple state legislators to speak. seems fairly newsworthy to me.

It would be noteworthy if 100 people showed up to my 5 year old's piano recital.

not so much for a 300 acre noisy, water hogging data center.

In Lansing, it was below freezing and windy most of the day. If I noticed 100 people standing around on the pavement for hours in that, I'd probably imagine they deserved at least some regard for their concerns. But then, I'm not a Michigan politician that needs to get gamer Johnny out of my basement and on to a cushy non-profit no-show kickback job, courtesy of whatever big tech outfit wants a data center.

There is very little common space in Michigan. There is a lot of private land, and a lot of public land, but very few spaces where people congregate. So when they do, it stands out quite a bit.

It wouldn't be newsworthy if we could trust our representatives not give extra weight to the opinions of the people who yell the loudest.

It’s not just this group. A co-worker of mine went to his town meeting about a proposed data center. When he showed up it was standing room only and they had to move the meeting to a bigger venue. I’ve heard stories like this from a few people now around Michigan where they have been trying to put data centers. No one wants them.

It’s a movement at 50[1].

[1] A. Guthrie, 1967

I was recently reminded how easily the public can be whipped into a frenzy of ignorance when I happened to revisit the Guardian article from 8 years ago that claimed data centers would use 20% of global electricity by 2025.'

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-...

The article is about all internet-connected devices:

"Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae."

It's not crazy to think it might increase to 20%. How much is it really in 2025?

The normally cited estimate of 2-4% already includes all networks, wired and wireless, and all client devices, mobile phones, and whatnot.

> normally cited estimate of 2-4%

I haven't seen that. Interestingly it's less than 2015, per the article.

The IEA periodically publishes these estimates. Some years they discuss client devices and/or networks. What's always been interesting to me in those reports is that mobile networks use about the same amount of power globally as data centers.

https://archive.is/8uNAJ

The headline could be construed to mean the data centers will be installed in the Michigan Capitol. I would have written it as "More than 100 rally at Michigan Capitol against data centers".

The "at" does the trick there and the headline seems fine. Yours leaves no room for that kind of parse confusion, but I think English prefers to leave space/time adverbs and adverbial phrases at the end.

I guess we have to build them in space.

At least in space the local residents don't complain

The NIMBYs would find a way to

Amid polarization, opposition to Michigan data centers cuts across political lines

https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/amid-polarization-opposit...

Data center proposed for Downtown Lansing would be first of its kind in US

https://www.wilx.com/2025/11/05/data-center-proposed-downtow...

At least 16 sites eyed for data centers in Michigan amid AI boom. Here's where

https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/at-least-16-sites-eyed-fo...

"The man from Deep Green, who earlier repeatedly reiterated his intention to be a "good neighbor," responded by saying "I get it, you're Luddites."

https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/opinion,171738

Residents protest data centers outside Michigan Capitol as debates rage on

"One of the speakers, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, took the podium first."

https://www.wilx.com/2025/12/16/data-center-protest-outside-...

Michigan data center developments raise concerns over water and power use

https://www.9and10news.com/2025/12/12/michigan-data-center-d...

Activists seeking a statewide moratorium on new AI data centers to rally in Lansing next week

https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/activists-seeking-a-state...

At the same time, data center being proposed for Lansing, NY also drawing opposition from local residents

https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/finger-lakes/blog/2025/1...

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