If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?
thebrockovichreport.com
thebrockovichreport.com
1. They're breaking environmental laws in order to meet power demands. xAI has already been busted on this [1], but they keep finding willing accomplices in rural parts of the country to bypass public opposition or speedrun through regulatory exceptions [2].
2. Companies seem to be fudging their numbers when it comes to GPU capacity & current workloads [3], likely to inflate their IPO valuations. I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure but I've not seen any journalist on the other side of the argument provide the volume of data that he has.
[1] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/musks-xai-draws-more-opposit...
[3] https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/
The main counterarguments to his claims are "but Sam/Dario/Satya/Jensen said X" and that we should treat them as gospel.
AI is a genuine source of economic growth. I can understand wanting to curtail it, but in return you are getting fewer jobs, less economic growth, more money to other countries who don't allow protesting or even complaining about data centers, etc.
Certainly not in any meaningful way.
so not only is it hypothetical but if it becomes a reality (which seems probable), it is highly destructive to the average person
Yes many servers are left in fail over states for long periods of time, but that can only be done because new capacity is actively being deployed to make up for that fail over. Modern data centers are far too big for a single person to be repairing things every once in a while. Stuff is breaking every hour of every day
Im not too surprised there is quite a bit to replace. Sure the failure rate should be low but the scale is massive. Its interesting to get an order of magnitude though. Every hour is more frequent than I thought.
I have let's say 17 data centers being built in my town. 1700 jobs is not enough according to the people in opposition. The real number is likely higher, and my town is under 30k people.
Since automation became big in industrial processes, most industrial development has been labor-poor (few workers) but continues to be land intensive. That means while industry might generate tax revenue, it doesn't have a coalition of labor advocates willing to champion the capacity because not many jobs are created. So we find ourselves in 2026 with an inability to actually build new industrial capacity in any form. The anti-tech crowd is angry at the data centers, but the same exact thing is happening when it comes to permitting new power generation and transmission lines. In fact many of the concerns related to data center power usage could be allayed if we had more power generation but nobody wants power generation in their backyard.
For decades now the US has been dancing around the idea that there is no by-right way to build anything anymore, so building any new large structure becomes a collective action problem that just ends up failing. Even when things get built, costs are massive. This has even affected things that the US is ostensibly really good at making such as highways, as evident in the recent Texas highway expansions ongoing.
This is from Dud Dudley writing in 1665, whose own ventures to manufacture steel en masse before Abraham Darby succeeded.
> "I have been opposed by many adversaries, as by wood colliers, mine owners, and others who, being poor men, did, by misguided advice, throw down and destroy two of my furnaces and my works, and caused much of my pigs and bar iron to be carried away."
There were plenty of examples through history of "near-misses" where establishment land/wealth holders suppressed nascent steel industries. It was almost an accidental series of coincidences that the industrial revolution happened - the Glorious Revolution in England and Abraham Darby's secret financing network.
It should also be remembered that while the industrial revolution netted humanity enormous wealth and eventually a higher average standard of living, it also kinda sucked for the generations of working class living through it, prior to labor reform. Millions of people lived entire lives where the industrial revolution was nothing but bad for them and never saw the upside. So anybody opposing a new industrial revolution is not necessarily acting out of irrationality.
One of the hard things to grasp is that the industrial revolution was preceded by an environmental collapse. Part of the reason there was a switch to coal (despite being seen as inferior to wood at the time) was massive depletion of wood in England and the high cost of importing not just timber but even just firewood.
Add this in to the enormously expensive wars England was fighting all through this period and stressed everything from labor and food supplies (which also triggered demand for steel and copper and brass) The industrial revolution happened against a backdrop of national crisis so it's hard to know what was being caused by the revolution and what the revolution was helping paper over.
And on top of this, when Engels and Marx wrote about the squalor and desperation of their time (which was very real), nearly a hundred years had passed and something much different was happening. Massive amounts of peasantry were being dispossessed of lands and forced into urban slums. Cities grew something like 10x in a single generation. This wasn't really the fault of the industrial revolution but because of really bad policy.
(BTW, this period in England when wages and quality of life backslid is now called "Engels' Pause" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels%27_pause)
These NIMBY jerks have redefined the entire country to be their back yard
The NIMBYs were pissy that the poors were allowing industrial development said "those poor people are stupid and wrong for accepting the industry" and the legislated hoops so that they essentially have a "say" in what these poorer communities can allow.
They usually leverage environmental laws to do this stuff because the richer areas are already developed and paved to high heaven. They aren't doing greenfield development and the laws are construed to basically punish/prevent greenfield development and allow brownfield development and re-development. Of course, residential gets exemptions to all sorts of stuff so their ADUs and the kind of development they do are mostly unaffected but the industrial stuff out in the sticks is all but prevented.
I see this in my own city that's over an hour drive from the rich places. We want to allow manufacturing but the state will take our grant money if we don't have and enforce a ton of rules and process that make that prohibitive so basically no industry can afford to create a facility except the biggest of BigCos.
Now obviously sometimes new developments really are bad, or they're being targeted at terrible spots -- you don't want a very polluting factory right next to a residential neighborhood.
But we've overcorrected drastically. The rules should be sensible and out in the open; planning committees should only be checking whether companies and governments have followed the law as written, not listening to every single possible objection from neighborhood residents about a new apartment complex affecting street parking or creating shadows.
As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, a "neighborhood group" that's using environmental rules to block a low-cost, employee-owned grocery store being added to a site that was already basically a grocery store (Sam's Club) before, is an insane weaponization of the rules. Nobody who was writing these laws ever intended environmental protections to be misused like this.
I’m asking genuinely, I’m open to changing my mind here.
* https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-ar...
* https://blog.andymasley.com/p/i-might-have-found-the-specifi...
> The Georgia data center is only using ~2% of the county’s water. For comparison, a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is using ~4% of the county’s water. A construction plant for Rivian cars is using about the same amount of water as Meta’s data center. The data center is functioning like any other normal industry in the county.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Regarding data centers increasing ambient temp, the paper is simply measuring the surface temperature of the buildings, going against the claim that a data center, merely by its presence in a community, raises the ambient temperature by a few degrees or more
https://andymasley.com/writing/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-...
I know both sources are from the same guy, but he cites many primary sources in his articles
Are the claims really that "Data centers use more water than other types of heavy manufacturing"? I dont think so.
Even if thats true, that doesn't mean they cant have a disastrous effect on the local water supply. This isnt a good rebuttal.
Frankly I tend to think the anti-datacenter crowd is overreacting. But I don't think you've addressed the real criticisms being levied.
In some passing research I saw the datacenters do continuously consume water (its not a one time cost like some claims I've read). And smaller size ones may use water equivalent to around 1000 households, and larger ones may consume closer to the equivalent of around 20,000 households. Evidently the massive one in Utah will at least double the state's entire consumption of water.
Can all of these places handle it?
I dont know. But that's the question, not if other types of heavy manufacturing have higher demands. And frankly it's inevitable that at least some locations cannot handle it. Which doens't mean you should be anti-datacenter in general. It means you can't just blanket dismiss the water concern for all locations.
One criticism I often see is that data centers somehow pollute the local water supply. Data centers use water in a closed loop, their impact on local water quality is negligible. Industrial manufacturing and even agriculture have a far greater deleterious effect.
> The EPA’s national assessments repeatedly identify agriculture as the leading source of impairment for rivers and streams due to nutrient and sediment runoff, with continued nitrogen and phosphorus problems that affect drinking water and coastal ecosystems.
The thing is, AI data centers bring in far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses), but use less water overall. Extreme panic over specifically their water use is disproportionate
> How much of this will be AI? Almost all this growth will be driven by AI, but because AI is only 20% of data center power use, its growth will have to be huge to triple total power usage. One forecast says AI energy use in America will be multiplied by 10 by 2030. Because water use is proportionate to energy use, we can multiply AI’s water use by 10 as well.
> So in 2030, AI in data centers specifically will be using 0.08% of America’s freshwater. This means it will rise to the level of 5% of America’s current water used on golf courses, or 5% of U.S. steel production, or be about 173 square miles of irrigated corn farms.
> The average American’s consumptive lifestyle freshwater footprint is 422 gallons per day. This means that in 2023, AI data centers used as much water as the lifestyles of 25,000 Americans, 0.007% of the population. By 2030, they might use as much as the lifestyles of 250,000 Americans, 0.07% of the population. Not nothing, but 250,000 people over 5 years is just 4% of America’s current rate of population growth. If you found out that immigration plus new births in America would increase by 4% of its current rate, would you first thought be “We can’t afford that, it’s way too much water”?
Yes, I think this one is completely misinformed. For example AOC held up some dirty water from a local resident's tap. Fine, that's bad. But it was a result of digging during the construction process and the fact that it was a data center was irrelevant. And the implication that it permanently ruined local's water supply was just wrong.
>The thing is, AI data centers bring in far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses), but use less water overall. Extreme panic over specifically their water use is disproportionate
I guess that's not surprising to hear. A lot of people against data centers are probably also against golf courses though. I think AI is valuable but a lot of opponents see it as a net negative. Not saying they are right - this is definitely a point against the anti datacenter crowd. But it is consistent from their perspective so I dont think this point will persuade them. Would need to attack the claim that AI is a net negative.
A 10x increase in AI data center buildout between 2023 and 2030 seems unlikely, given the large number of AI data centers either in progress, or in the planning stages.
"Closed loop" doesn't mean no net water use after filling. There are leaks, and the water in the system needs to be processed for reuse, and that processing needs clean water.
Even if there is no next water use, "closed loop" refers to cooling the data center proper, and excludes the water for the (primarily) thermoelectric power plants which power those data centers - a power load which is higher due to using closed loop cooling instead of evaporative cooling.
Given that many of these are the same companies which once promised net-zero CO2 emissions by 2030, you'll excuse me if I insist on full information about the total environmental impact and tearing up all of the NDAs they require from local governments.
How many liters per kilowatt-hour does each site use? How much CO2, NOx, and particulates are produced? What are the power sources? Why are EPA waivers needed and appropriate?
This should ideally include the supply chain - those GPUs need a lot of very pure water, and 83.2% of Taiwan's power and almost 60% of South Korea's comes from fossil fuels.
> their impact on local water quality is negligible.
So there should be absolutely no issues in publishing all this information, right?
> far more tax revenue than other water-guzzling domains (like golf courses),
Which people already complain about because they use too much water, and often exist only because rich people got special arrangements. For some examples of the antipathy for the Santa Fe Country Club and golf courses in general, see https://www.reddit.com/r/SantaFe/comments/w9g4ak/the_city_of... .
But even the Santa Fe Country Club case highlights how tax revenue is only part of the total economic benefit. For example, they were allotted 700,000 gallons of treated effluent per day, in exchange for public golf access with reasonable fees. While data centers typically used treated water, not treated effluent, and don't allow public access or activities.
For that matter, local birders visit the municipal course, Marty Sanchez Links, to see the birds using the water features and irrigation pond. Not a benefit a data center will offer.
From what I hear, surrounding residential prices go up around a golf course, and down around a data center, so looking at just a single entity's tax revenue isn't enough. To say nothing of the special tax deals the data centers insist on.
Under NDA, of course, which should be illegal for this sort of issue.
> AI in data centers specifically will be using 0.08% of America’s freshwater
Since you think these centers can be sited anywhere, why are these data centers being put in water constrained places like Utah, rather than water rich places like Michigan?
> The average American’s consumptive lifestyle freshwater footprint is 422 gallons per day.
Sante Feans use under 100 gallons per capita per day.
If you think the average American use is relevant, then put the data centers some place where there's water.
> If you found out that immigration plus new births in America would increase by 4% of its current rate, would you first thought be “We can’t afford that, it’s way too much water”?
Water use per capita has been decreasing over time due in part to mandated water-efficient fixtures and appliances, but also (at least in New Mexico) to changing practices like allowing xeriscaping in places which once mandated lawns, rain barrel and cistern rebates, mandated toilet retrofits, and water use awareness programs.
Or see this projection for Utah, at https://lpputah.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Water-Use-Why... .
Population go up. Per capital water use go down. No problem.
Data center go up with nothing else going down? Problem.
How much water will the Utah data centers use? You don't know.
How much employment and localized value/tax revenue is created by the pharma plant compared to the data center to offset the environmental effect?
The point of living in a rich country is that you don't lower your standards to shit holes with corrupt governments...
since AI -- as designed to be deployed -- is taking away jobs, then by enabling data centers you are in fact getting fewer jobs
yours is the same perverse argument that was used to build Walmart Supercenters (lower prices! they'll create jobs!) which literally destroyed the economy of many small towns and communities, and paved the way for every other big box retailer to do the same
so don't be surprised that people aren't eager to enable something that is designed to destroy their livelihood
If only they could spur even more economic growth with the planning and construction of more fabs for all the RAM it will need (assuming the level of growth that their S-1s are claiming)
They extract local resources (land, power, grid capacity, water, etc) and sell that as compute. As a rule, the mine operators are national or multi-national firms that have no presence with which to invest the extraction profits back into the community. The local resources are harvested, processed, and sold, and then the proceeds disperse into the books of these gargantuan, far-off operators.
The only way to recover some of the profits on those local resources where they're being harvested would be with taxes or similar ongoing development obligations, but the firms specifically predate on communities too politically weak to levy those against them.
If AI isn't just an speculative bubble with gross overinvestment, they may have important value as a national economic or security interest, but they're pretty terrible and lop-sided deal for existing communities. That's why they're kept quiet.
It sucks that this how it is but even just the most casual familiarity with all the rules and processes makes it obvious why this is the way it is.
You could find more than enough data points to write this same story about grocery stores or anything else.
Seattle is currently dealing with this for a new WinCo -- which is low-priced and employee-owned, making it particularly unobjectionable -- on a site that used to be a Sam's Club, so it's not even really a new development: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/winco-plan...
> North Seattle shoppers may need to wait even longer for a grocery store to fill a former Sam’s Club location left vacant since 2018
> Two years ago, discount grocery chain WinCo filed plans to remodel the building and reconfigure the parking lot on Aurora Avenue North. But the plans encountered opposition from a neighborhood group for their possible environmental impact.
> Last week, a hearing examiner overturned the city’s determination that the project would have no significant environmental impacts, casting doubts on the future of the project.
> ...
> For a while, everything seemed on track. The city conducted a State Environmental Policy Act process and found WinCo’s plans would have no significant environmental impact.
> Then, last fall, a coalition called Lake Washington Working Families appealed the decision. The group, which tried and failed to disrupt plans for a WinCo coming to Renton last spring, has no website and is not registered with the state — leading to online speculation about who exactly is behind the group. But Karl Anuta, a Portland-based lawyer representing the coalition, said it’s made up of King County residents.
> The coalition claimed the city’s environmental analysis of WinCo’s plans for the North Seattle site was inadequate and required further review. WinCo would have major traffic impacts, the appeal said, releasing pollutants into local bodies of water.
> In an interview Monday, Anuta, who primarily handles cases involving environmental law, said the group is not against having a WinCo store at the location but wants the city to seriously analyze the environmental impacts of such a large business.
> “The real issue for the Lake Washington Working Families was you’re going from eight years of nothing there to a larger facility with many impacts,” he said.
> “You can’t just permit stuff and expect the neighbors to deal with the consequences.”
This is why environmental regulations and processes are getting pushback -- not because people hate the environment, but because NIMBYs learned to weaponize these rules against almost any kind of development, even the kind of thing that the overwhelming majority of people in an area support.
I'm reading this as "WinCo competitors who live in King County" instead of NIMBYs. It seems real shady and of course they'd want to make it seem like it was just a group of good ol' regular folks.
It works in smaller groups where basically everyone is engaging in good faith and willing to listen to each other. It works a lot less well on a pseudonymous message board.
Just as an example, there's a data center in the early stages about 10 miles from my house. The land developer spent a year shopping for a city council that would skip the hearings required by state law and finally found a small exurb willing to break the law. Now the developer is racing to break ground before the lawsuits and restraining orders hit. This isn't the way that a logical society should work.
Oh no. God forbid an out of towner be given the kind of treatment you usually need the "right" last name or business partners for. <clutches pearls>
The developer is probably well practiced at this because even for mundane developments beyond about an acre you basically have to have a legal team and basically have to drag it through a court even if you have local support because the other developers will pull their strings in government to try and stall and drive up the cost of your thing.
Land development is a revolving door club between government and the prevailing developer and related business interests in the jurisdiction so you can't really blame the external interest for showing up with everything ready to go and steamrolling everyone.
My conclusion is that "NIMBY" isn't the problem, it's economic incentives and adversarial systems.
Nearly everything in your town is built like this. The amount of people who come out of the woodwork to oppose coffee shops, housing development, new hospitals, bus stops, etc would astound you. Try attending a local city council meeting. Part of the reason civic infrastructure takes so long and costs so much is because of the enormous burdens of transparency.
Or the sheer number of things that can go wrong during zoning, development, etc. The best time to announce a new business is when construction is nearly done. And the cities themselves want the development to be secret because they don't want to be underbid by the town next door (did anybody actually like the transparency of Amazon's HQ2 process?)
But the datacenter they couldn't stop has made national news multiple times.
Also, what wealth? "Please allow me to exploit your land for little benefit to you" isn't a great selling point.
"If bank vaults are so great, why would you not advertise their locations". It's a mystery, is what it is.
"Why would you not tell us how to get to the secret dimension if it's so great?" It's just a dumb question.
Yes, but the more important correlation is between keeping something secret and it being a bad idea (at least for some people). It's like using security through obscurity - it has to be kept secret because it's flawed, whereas a bank vault doesn't need to be in a secret location because it has other means of protecting its contents.
There's so many examples of closed source "security" that is just a clusterfuck. Not that mistakes aren't made with open source, but knowing that other people will likely look at your code tends to make people put a bit more thought into it.
More people can however work on a great plan to attack it, which only has to work once, to be worth it.
> So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?
Because of this (emphasis mine):
> They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values
How are you supposed to have reasonable discussion about land use, economic impacts, zoning, etc when you're getting flooded with input from crockpots?
I could be convinced on negative environmental impact of data centers in a few ways. I could believe there's additional strain on water purification infrastructure if the open loop cooling systems are using additives and creating additional volume of water that existing treatment plants weren't designed to handle. I could believe that additional power demand and on-site generators using fossil fuels could create pollution where it didn't exist before. I could believe that in a rush to build quicker, construction crews take shortcuts.
Basically all industrial activity on this planet creates waste that can harm people. That's why we create zones for it away from residences, and why land closer to it is cheaper.
This is all stuff you can engage with good faith. The problem is these are not the claims that the crazy people are making, and not the ones it sounds like the author of TFA is bothering to investigate. There's a large group of people that will believe "thing bad, thing hurt" with zero evidence besides vibes, and you can't meet with psychosis on shared ground.
I mean yes, Amazon servers in the middle east aren't doing great, but I guess it's not what you're talking about
Of course there are also data centers in the middle of cities but these are smaller.
Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.“ And ask if AI is so great why hasn’t it designed resource efficient data centers?
And ask what the data centers are actually doing. Bitcoin mining, anyone?”
Says all you need to know about the competency level of this position, which is ideological and not fact-based
Ironically the very same people profiting most off of them are the ones saying they’re going to leave the country if they’re forced to pay anything resembling a fair tax rate. They’re always all about socializing costs and privatizing profits and the common folks are finally waking up to it.
https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...
Almond farming uses massive amounts of water, which has caused environmental impact concerns in the past.
There are many, many reasons to oppose datacenters. Not the least is they're there to drive inequality to ever-greater heights and they're 21st century version of the toxic waste dump (put 'em where people are weak and marginalized).
But water use is a very simple argument, and sometimes you have to pound on those to get through to the general public that's not immediately affected.
You misunderstand: data centers usually do use a lot of water, and I think the lie is "data centers use very little water." I believe it's possible for them to use little, but that's a choice that costs money. What I mean was instead of arguing the nuances of cooling or a particular project (which probably keeps all the details secret anyway), it makes sense to simplify and emphasize the water use angle.
We have a shortage of neither.
In places where there are significant water shortages, water hungry data centers are not being built.
https://www.newsweek.com/map-data-centers-built-drought-hit-...
But that’s really the problem - “we” don’t get any say in these decisions. A bunch of corrupt politicians and rich oligarchs make these decisions that screw over the rest of us.
And yes, for the record, I’m not uniquely against “AI” data centers. I’m opposed to a lot of other environmentally harmful and wasteful developments. They don’t get hyped up like “AI” does, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
My understanding was that often multiple cooling methods are employed and the ratio of use shifts seasonally; however, that evaporative cooling was still primary method, especially in hotter climates like CA and AZ.
Can you help me understand what type of data center (size, location, etc) uses less water than a busy restaurant?
Hell I will always side with locals WHO ACTUALLY LIVE THERE than IT workers in their Google cubicles lmao. Ofcourse America in it's dystopian wisdom is now making corporations vote...
In fact as late as Jan 2026 Google was proudly presenting their new data centers in Bangkok: https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-01-21-Google-Clo...
Disclaimer: Google Cloud employee