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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, companies building things is *constantly* under scrutiny for local building plans. That’s literally what the NIMBY / YIMBY movements are all about - using political clout and power (especially including voting) to affect what can and cannot be built.

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That's not quite correct. There's a lot of NIMBY pressure in cities, where land is scarce and there's lots of people to attend planning meetings to block building.

However, if you want to build a datacenter, you don't need to build it in downtown Manhattan. You can build it anywhere, and some places make it easy to build data centers.

By definition local restrictions apply locally. If you want more housing in Manhattan then Manhattan nimbyism really matters. But if you want to build a data center somewhere you have a lot of options. There's no nationwide vote on allowing datacenter construction.

I do wonder if you'll see local community NIMBYs about it though. Electricity prices near data centers go up, right?

No, they go down, obviously if you think about it. Having a huge volume consumer nearby amortizes away the fixed costs of the grid, which are massive.

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S10406190250006...

Except,

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

> Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

Yeah I don't have the inclination to repeat myself but it's a bad article based on bad data and flawed reasoning.

Bloomberg also ran this article, by the same author, that says AI data centers are interfering with your applicances, which is also pure bullshit.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-applia...

What fixed costs of the grid? In Northern Virginia, we’re constantly adding substations and transmission lines because the grid isn’t a fixed cost when you’re building data centers constantly; it quickly becomes a variable cost.

> Electricity prices near data centers go up, right?

I hear this a lot, but the most comprehensive study I've seen found the opposite -- that retail electricity prices tend to decrease as load (from datacenters and other consumers) increases [1].

The places where electricity prices have increased the most since 2019 (California, Hawaii, and the Northeast) are not places where they're building a lot of new datacenters.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...

While that’s true, and there are several locations that are using their local authority to perform those actions; but, *all* of that is power wielded by elected officials. The smaller the location the less “who voted for this” likely means anything because the decisions that are made that impact all of us are made by a smaller and smaller number of people with less and less authority, but it is still voted for.

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