Data centers trigger voter backlash
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
I live in an historic district. I had to attend a public meeting a couple years ago to get approval to change a lamp post. It is perfectly reasonable to ask tech companies to show up and defend massive projects to the public.
in any case, this isn't like "oh we don't want to build an apartment building because it might drop the value of a single family home halfway across town."
it isn't even like "we want to build this train line which will have some negative externalities but the positive effects (and externalities) are worth taking a hit in some areas"
the problems with the datacenters are that like (1) the service its providing (LLMs) has dubious societal value, (2) the direct negative effects such as noise pollution and such have been pretty well documented, (3) the indirect negative effects like massive strain on infra and (4) the people pushing them most heavily are effectively attempting to invade the communities, peddle conspiracy theories about "china" being behind the opposition, and demand to be specially treated because they were bankrolled by big tech, etc.
some people when this topic come up act like anyone opposed is some nimby who hates societal progress or smth and who is super concerned about that their home estimate might go down. but like communities do recognize the need for zoning and restricting certain things being built.
you need the thing being built to both (a) actually be a good that helps the community (or have a very very good reason why some damage to the community is justifiable (datacenter projects generally don't) and (b) need to contain negative externalities (which is why we don't put the chemical plant next to the elementary school even if it's the most economic option). people recognize these things on some level.
Guess what was happening, local politicians were treating long term residents as trash in the face of big hotels/apartments who had loads of money.
Fun part was that those apartments/hotels wouldn’t hire locals but rather people who would drive like 20-30 km away.
Bad deal all way round for locals but of course local government people would pocket their share one way or the other if not from outright bribery.
This is also true for data centers. They tell you there will be new jobs, but what they don't tell you is the people working there will be employed by an established contractor and driving in from the nearest metro area, not the locals.
Because where are the tourists supposed to stay if there's no hotels?
There is never shortage of hotels. They pop up is actual econony supports it. No reason to take bribes
My parents had odd jobs, construction, chemical processing operations. There was some small scale industry running there as well but it went bust when people wanted fresh air for tourism. Even if the industry was really small scale for marketing sake local government got rid of all of it.
I also don’t live there anymore as I wrote „I was living in a touristy area”.
If I would stay there, there was no future for me there.
I’m curious where you personally draw the line.
First use should be heavily debated and almost always avoided.
In response to {immediate pressing life threatening conditions at scale} .. they can be discussed and game planned well in advance and voted on - even if that vote is limited to a large pool with a breadth of military and diplomatic experience.
The current US practice of "POTUS can, like, do whatever" is pretty tragic.
We do every 4 years
The water treatment plant often will be voted on, because it will often be financed by a bond issue or levy that requires voter approval.
The apartment complex is the only one that doesn't fall into either of those types of projects, and this is one that gets exceptions because it is to solve a problem the local area is having by directly addressing that problem. They need more nearby housing, so they make exceptions for housing projects.
Not many towns have found their AI needs are hard to meet because of the latency over the internet to their AI provider's datacenter, and so need to get a local datacenter built.
People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood that involves non-public land just doesnt make any sense to me.
Why do people think that because they have a house somewhere they should get the ability to freeze an entire town in time and disallow anyone to build anything. Seriously, where did this mindset come from?
Most things that create value have externalities. I kill the moss on my roof, then it rains and the chemicals go into the stream, then you try to go fishing and get skunked. I exerted my freedom as a private property owner and got the benefits; you paid for the drawbacks. We're all pulling from the same pile of resources, and the Earth doesn't care where your picket fence is.
Data centers incur expensive externalities and you're asking the general public to bear those costs -- or "pay those taxes," if that resonates more. I suppose NIMBYism is part of it, but we're not talking about ugly condos here, we're talking about towns running out of electricity: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-....
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.
can you read brother. do you know what the word local means
Yes, I believe that’s called “society” and while we are all very disappointed about your personal liberties I’m afraid some compromises had to be made to allow people other than you to have property rights too.
Or confusing with State law preventing homeowners' associations (HOAs) from enforcing new covenants that restrict the use of your property, compared to what was allowed when you originally purchased it.
I'll happily live next to rusty car guy. I would rather eat glass than have to live near a data center.
again, owning a piece of property doesnt give you influence over the people around you if they arent doing anything illegal.
You are just putting off the hard work into "doing anything illegal" which is even more ironic considering this is a thread about people either a)passing laws which make constructing ai datacenters illegal or b) voting out politicians they do not believe are acting in the interest of the constituency
Would you like me to buy the lot next to your house and set up a 3000W sound system pumping noise music 24 hours directly at your bedroom? Because that's what you're arguing for.
Taking GP's example further, let's say they have enough money to build their 3000W sound system AND maybe also build a cushy new building for the local police, who will then respond to your noise complaints by telling you it's really not that bad and maybe you should invest in some noise-canceling headphones.
These private property owners you are concerned about normally bought the land with these difficulties you are worried about priced in to the land's value. Why should to government hand them free money in the form of not enforcing what has been priced into the land value?
If the data center existed in a vaccum, with no inputs or outputs, this argument would hold some weight.
Instead, they stress limited water supplies, cause power shortages, increase GHG emissions (which we, the public ultimately have to pay for, either through mitigation or dealing with the damage after the fact).
Oh, and also they may well have negative externalities to employment. They definitely have negative externalities to communication, the internet has been flooded with AIshit.
So... iron smeltery next door for you then? Acid rain?
Come on. There is reasonable concern for property rights and civil coexistence and then there's Randian Libertarian Claptrap, and you've hopped right into the deep end.
YES, government has a clear and obvious interest, as a matter of principle, in the regulation of land use and development. This doesn't change just because you think the government made a wrong decision in a particular instance. The solution is to fix the government. Go vote for datacenter candidates. Seems like no one else is.
1. it should be controlled at the state or county level not locally
2. local communities/boards should have zero input in what is permitted if the project passes zoning laws.
so no, iron smeltery in a residential neighboorhood not allowed. but if someone is trying to build a datacenter in an industrial area you have zero say in the matter.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems
* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.
* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.
I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.
Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.
I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
The solution is not to price water as a commodity, either. If we priced water high enough to disincentivize waste, we would create an incredible burden for regular people. Water should be as cheap as possible, and at the same time regulated to guarantee an amount of conservation. People who can afford to more than double a state's power grid capacity, all for a single data center, can afford more water than the populace can afford.
What we need is to regulate water use generally so that the watersheds and ecosystems we rely on can be reasonably conserved.
Is that true? I've only ever lived places where we pay for water by the gallon from a municipal system. I've always assumed that's how most non-agricultural consumers of water pay.
> we would create an incredible burden for regular people
Why do you think that? Google says the average household water bill is $48 to $70 / month. If you priced it on an exponential curve, the first gallons could be practically free and the millionth gallon could be crazy expensive. Data centers can use millions of gallons per day. That should be outrageously expensive in places where water is scarce.
If you dig a well, you probably own the lot, and also own associated water rights. Otherwise, you are paying for water processing and municipal reservoir management by the gallon. That's how it works for people in houses.
Your mistake is assuming a datacenter is more like that, and less like an agricultural consumer. It's the other way around. A data center and/or power plant handles its own water processing, which only involves water rights.
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
The answer to that is so obviously "no" that I wonder how much attention they've been paying.
The local politician's thinking is thusly:
- Datacenters are going to happen somewhere. And when this inevitably occurs, jobs everywhere, including here, will disappear. There is nothing I can do about that. It's as baked into my assumptions about the near future, as is the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow.
- If I allow the datacenter to happen here then while the builders are here they might buy some stuff locally for the build, and after they are done, the datacenter will employ literally a handful of people to guard and maintain the place. Not much of a gain, but, hey, the alternative is that I have nothing at all.
In other words, the 'competition' aspect between states / bundeslander / EU countries is causing these entities to race to the bottom together.
The solution is... not to do that. As somebody living in a country that doesn't suffer from this particular malady (The Netherlands, which does have provinces, and provinces work in reverse from states: The only rights they have are ones explicitly allotted to them by the state; The Netherlands is not a 'federation of provinces', whereas the US is a 'federation of states', Germany is a 'federation of bundleslander', and the EU is a federation of countries).
It means a province in The Netherlands cannot just offer a would be major company some ridiculous boon to come settle in their province at the cost of other provinces, because provinces in The Netherlands do not have the right to dictate e.g. tax rates, and even any infra project they would do requires permission (and funds) from the 'federal level' (the country).
It's been going on for ten years and there have been nada, zero, zilch solutions to the problem. Thus my stance remains: You have to put a stop to that. The problem is, of course, this requires an entity that currently has some power (namely: states / bundeslander / EU countries) to voluntarily give up power to the federated entity that sits 'above' them, and it's always difficult to convince an entity with power to voluntarily relinquish it.
Still, that's the job.
A 1GW DC would have to employ 75,000 people if that’s an acceptable ratio.
If you don't understand why people don't want them, you're probably trying not to. It's not that hard.
There doesn't have to be but since when is it not in a municipalities ability to make determinations as to what kinds of business can operate within its jurisdiction?
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
Even if the AI bubble pops, the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers. I don’t care if a data center developer/speculator loses their shirt. The data center will stand long after they fold and someone will operate it.
Build it here. Create the construction jobs. Collect the property taxes.
Eat while there’s food.
> people on UBI are also rather useless
The point of life is not “that you be useful to the wealthy”.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bezos-water-consumption-ai...
UBI is going to get us a lot more artists of all kinds.
What great art are these folks producing since they aren't burdened by having to work to survive? Mumble rap on Soundcloud? Shitty graffiti on every building?
I think the tech bros want to replace artists also
A plot of land that’s already zoned for the heaviest of industrial activities, is across the street from a dump, 3 miles from an airport, 16 miles from a nuclear generating station, and in a region with good climate, and no water crunch is a pretty good place for a data center.
Facts don’t matter, it’s a religious fight. Even if you provide numbers specific to the local area there’s no way to pierce the rhetoric.
Too much land? I added up lol the land used by the 10+ golf courses in the area. Dwarfs the proposal.
Too much water? I called the head of the parks department and asked them how much water the golf courses that they operate use each year. Massive.
Regional electricity costs going up? Our nuclear generating station already sells 80-85% of all power generated wholesale to other markets.
Data centers are loud? I measured the noise outside of my house. I live on a busy street. It was much louder than the viral videos going around Facebook with titles like “Data center noise from my porch SCARY MUST WATCH”.
I don’t know about all proposed data centers everywhere, but the one they’re eyeing to build in my backyard is fine by me.
I lived in Northern Virginia for years. Data centers are everywhere.
It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are actually far more efficient than the alternatives. Just don’t run them on coal, natural gas, or the souls of orphans. And don’t rely exclusively on evaporative cooling if it’s in the desert.
They’re having fun treating tech people like villains. It was the same or worse with bankers back in 2008-2010. Anything I have to say, any data provided, any comparisons made, are biassed because I “use data centers”. When I explain that they use data centers as well, I get the finger.
When I talked to an anti data center family member who runs a local Facebook news group (5,000+ subscribers) they just kept sending me Google AI summaries as counter points… My god. I don’t even use gen AI.
People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”. All of this on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. How many data centers are involved to get a post from poster to viewer? 2? 3? 8?
A bad data center project proposal somewhere should not mean opposition to data center projects everywhere.
This isn't about efficiency, power, water, or fire. AT ALL.
Massive amounts of people have their jobs and livelihood threatened. The datacenters, which are enabling that, are being deployed in their neighborhoods while everyone in that neighborhood goes jobless. There is no plan of relief in the form of better economic policy, UBI, less taxation of actual humans, or anything else. That is the real crux of what is being fought.
The US unemployment rate is currently 4.3%.
I don’t have any faith in the current crop of gen AI. I think it’s junk. I don’t think it’s replacing humans in drives. I can barely get it to refactor Sass code into a mixin.
Even if the AI bubble pops the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers.
If a speculator wants to create a bunch of construction jobs, build a site in a region with the power, water, climate to do so responsibly, and give us a bunch of money in property taxes. I’m for it.
I don’t care if his company folds and he loses his shirt. Someone will operate the data center.
They can’t get back the money they injected into the community during construction.
Eat while there’s food.
Even plumbers. AI told me what to buy from Home Depot and I diagnosed and fixed my last 2 plumbing problems myself.
And lawyers. I fought some minor issues on my own with AI guidance.
You didn’t need AI for your plumbing. My dad had a whole set of books on household chores that we used to fix everything.
I do more of the work around my house than most. I won’t touch tall trees to fuck with my breaker box. I do most of my own plumbing.
But, plumbers are fine. Most people don’t want to handle their own shit.
People will use it, because they don't have money for real therapists, because they also lost their own job. Maybe you can give them free therapy if you think it's a bad idea?
> I don’t know too many people who are using AI art commercially
I see AI stock images absolutely everywhere in the news now, AI portraits all over the place, AI relit product images absolutely everywhere.
> You didn’t need AI for your plumbing. My dad had a whole set of books on household chores
I don't have time to read books when I have a plumbing issue and other shit to do. Normally I'd have paid $200 for a plumber. But with AI I didn't have to read the books, and I was able to solve it myself for $30.
Commercially, I typically see AI used in what amount to scams. And no, I don’t believe that anyone should be using it for therapy.
You don’t have time to glance at a diagram in a book but you have time to ask AI and go to Home Depot and do it yourself?
If you’re worried about job loss, pay the plumber.
You could argue that you still put money into the local economy by shopping locally. The money you saved by doing it yourself could be spent locally on dinner and ice cream. Money is fungible.
If you’re concerned about the impacts of AI you could start to mitigate them by choosing not to use AI yourself.
It’s been a few hours. I’ve said all I have to say under this post. I’m going to stop replying now.
Consider this:
- People are struggling more and more financially, with income that does not keep up with inflation
- People are seeing inequality rise with the ultra-rich getting ultra-richer
- People are seeing climate change quickly changing their environment for the worst: droughts, heatwaves, storms...
- People are expecting climate change to make their financial prospect worse, too
And they see their own government encouraging and subsidising these projects, how could they not feel betrayed?
> People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”.
I don't think so. People would rather these benefits weren't there, but people exist in society and balance principle with practicality. You're allowed to criticise how AI is being brought into society while also using AI yourself, moral purity isn't a requirement to having opinions.
Hell, I don’t even use gen AI, I still think it’s unreliable junk.
However, most of the things that the people in my community are concerned about don’t apply to our region specifically. We’re actually in a position to benefit GREATLY. It’s useful to have that conversation.
I think it’s a topic that’s scary to many and this datacenter-to-be, or the local banker, just happens to be what they can easily protest.
Literally anything that they could build there other than a data center would have a greater negative impact on the environment and a far less positive economic impact.
I could build a concrete crushing plant there.
Pollution, ok, regular industry generates more. But property tax revenue? Why would DCs provide more property tax revenue?
It's funny that this is such a common takeaway from 2008. The bankers are bad because people lost their homes.
It's the right guilty party and the right victim but not the right crime.
The bad thing was bankers irresponsibly putting those people in homes in the first place. The people were always going to lose those homes because they couldn't afford them.
I’m putting things into perspective for people who are terrified that the last drops of their potable water and going to be used to generate a meme video.
All for rezoning golf courses too
Oh, and datacenters alone shouldn't even make electricity more expensive, because rates are regulated. The state regulators have to approve rate raises. Now, are the regulators a bunch of stooges captured by the utilities who always do their bidding? Probably! But that's a good reason to throw your corrupt state politicians out of office and hopefully run them out of town on a rail -- not to protest datacenters.
Is this supposed to scare me or something? I can't even fathom the actual point you are trying to make if it doesn't involve me having an emotional response to this statement.
the people who make this true are the same people who oppose the data centers. if they just let people build solar and data centers neither of those things would be true.
in b4 the 'apples and oranges' cope
Are you counting the externalized data center use of the people in that house?
The data center in question in Utah was marketed as a 9GW full build out natural gas facility more than twice the electrical generation of the entire state. Coal electrical production in the US increased 13% last year.
In my area we have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from that site. It sells 80-85% of all power generate wholesale to other markets. We have the power infrastructure here.
I do agree that other demands like water consumption are overblown and could be largely regulated to enforce best practices. What infrastructure we are building as a society to meet this load demand is going to be the lasting impact of this generational infrastructure investment and it's looking like that will be mostly fossil fuel based in the near to mid term.
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
What’s more of a concern is coal being kept online just for data centers. Even if the national average drops, that’s a regional health risk where it happens.
https://www.powermag.com/power-demand-from-data-centers-keep...
Do you trust these tech bros to be truthful?
> Just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line sits dozens of unpermitted gas turbines that power xAI’s Colossus 2 data center while releasing smog-forming pollution, soot, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde. The tech company set up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences.
https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.
for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.
so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.
effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
The same should apply to memory and GPU manufacturers and yet I have seen no commitments from them to increase supply, so the end result is that consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive compared to even just a year ago. That doesn't feel like a working economy to me.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, the article makes it seem like all that new capacity will be reserved for AI infra, not consumer electronics or personal computing, which is what my comment was specifically about. Happy to be proven wrong if Micron has said anything about reviving the Crucial brand or Sony committing to lowering console pricing because they (or their memory supplier) secured capacity.
Future Illinois data center tax breaks on hold - https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-br... - June 25th, 2026
State Data Center Policy Shifts as Governors Impose New Restrictions - https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-cente... - June 22nd, 2026
Gov. JB Pritzker suspends tax breaks for data centers, urges more discussion - https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-susp... - June 5th, 2026
Which States Are Banning Data Centers? - https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-ce... - June 2nd, 2026
US tax incentives for data centers by state - https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04c...
Tax Incentives for Data Centers 50 State Survey - https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentives... [pdf]
Remember how “everyone” said all trucks will be self-driving in 10 years… 15 years ago?
There are something like 1200 data center proposals cross the US. How many of those will actually be built? How many are being proposed by speculators with no experience building or operating data centers? I have a feeling the number that will actually be built is significantly less that 1200.
And I suppose that depends on whether I die first from not having access to healthcare after AI takes my job.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.25329104v...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11326321/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
And more just a Google search away.
And unfortunately, these aren't actual examples of medical progress being made. AI in some capacity is absolutely going to be helpful for medical research, but I'm still very skeptical LLMs are what is going to do it. I also do not think all the other BS coming with the current LLM wave outweighs the benefits. I think the reaction would be much different if these things weren't conflated, and if the focus of AI was towards things like medical research. As it stands, it comes off more as a coping mechanism / excuse that I do not think is convincing for most people when they see the majority of AI is used for garbage (to put it lightly).
Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?
They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.
And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.
It's complete speculation! It's the new gold rush and everyone wants a data center. Most of these data centers might not even be built! And the ones that are, might never make any profit.
| Year | Capacity (GW) | Construction Spending |
| 2015 | 0.2 – 0.3 GW | $1.8 Billion |
| 2016 | 0.3 – 0.4 GW | $2.2 Billion |
| 2017 | 0.4 – 0.5 GW | $3.1 Billion |
| 2018 | 0.5 – 0.6 GW | $4.5 Billion |
| 2019 | 0.6 – 0.7 GW | $6.2 Billion |
| 2020 | 0.8 – 1.0 GW | $8.0 Billion |
| 2021 | 1.2 – 1.5 GW | $10.0 Billion |
| 2022 | 2.0 – 2.5 GW | $15.0 Billion |
| 2023 | 3.5 – 4.0 GW | $20.0 Billion |
| 2024 | 6.4 GW | $35.0 Billion |
| 2025 | 8.5 GW | $46.0 Billion |
| 2026 | 13.6 GW | $50.7 Billion |
There is absolutely no way that increase was planned due to precisely planned for capacity. It's speculation.
It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.
But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.
Allegedly.
Another groups claims false flag operation. Ain't it great?
But I absolutely believe that social media's agenda is a directed agenda.
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB (Adam Tooze prezi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
2020 - 79 : 20 (renewables : fossil fuel)
2026 - 57 : 42
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/04/03/americans-shi...
When things are stagnant, we gradually optimize our lives towards a low energy state and overfit to our exact circumstances. When a change in circumstances reveals past optimizations to be wasted work, it kick-starts the four stages of grief over the loss of that low energy state.
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
There no reason to give them tax breaks. They don’t do anything of substance to the local economy.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
My mother is fully aboard the "a datacenter ruins the local town" train. She is looking to sell her small farm and move, but she's literally asking AI if a datacenter is planned in every town she's looking into moving to.
Not "is there a datacenter within 500 feet of the home I'm looking to buy" - but anywhere in the county. She just does not have an inkling of the local impact but hoovers up all the doomerism on the topic.
She also doesn't like them due to "billionaires" but the idea that a datacenter makes the surrounding 10 mile area unlivable is front and center. The irresponsible reporting and social media environment has made her terrified of what amounts to glorified warehouses being located a few miles down the road she otherwise never would have known existed. No amount of showing her what they really are (having worked in datacenters my whole adult life) can change her mind.
Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.
I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
Source?
Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
> Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not
I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
Then you should have no problem pointing to concrete examples of how it's actually improved life for the average person.
> I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
If you want to describe anyone with any education as an "elite", go ahead, but it's not convincing and is pretty anti-intellectual.
I sure am glad I'm apparently an elite and didn't know it, though! Who knew being an elite means you're barely able to make rent, will never be able to afford having children, have to forgo medical care due to the costs involved, and would be homeless within a few months if you got laid off?
Jump today most countries stable enough to build infrastructure are democracies and the white collar people you are demonizing do vote and that immense investment in infrastructure is not really easy to relocate.
this is one of the core flaws in democracy, while the popularity contest generally curbs blatant abuse (also note how even that fails miserably when the electorate groups start to hate each other), the vast majority of people have no real way to judge the impacts of non-trivial decisions and judgement doesn't even need to come with certainty, just knowing which risks are worth it. voters will never get it right.
and in the information age, democratic sabotage is many times easier than informing a public that in most cases has no interest in being informed when the group think/herd instincts are triggered.
i suspect democracy only worked well thus far because it was never truly real. media was always concentrated and there were no non-democratic peers. this is no longer the case. when the media was concentrated democracy was just an emergent properly of media dynamics. now it's chaotic and subject to external targeted perturbation.
while the next GLM model may get a similar open release, I doubt the one after that will.
Open source isn't a zero-sum game.
That tap can be shut off at any time and it's already being shut off for their biggest models.
It doesn’t make any sense to me as the externalities are future not current and at no other point in time has the public cared about the future without first seeing concrete examples of harm. That hasn’t happened yet for data centers nor AI. It’s all “if, maybe, sometime in the future”
People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. So it feels like people are stirring the pot. like if not Russia or China then just influencers doing it for rage bait for likes and subscribes
I’m not saying they are wrong, I can’t predict the future, I’m only saying it feels unusual for the reasons mentioned above
This is a wild claim because it's trivially provable. There's been tons of reporting around the effect they have on the immediate vicinity, and that's without even getting into the unknown long-term effects.
Here's a decent piece, but there's plenty more out there if you look at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
Is every single mad person doing investigative reporting and / or living next to a data center? No. But something doesn't have to personally affect me to know it's harmful.
At the start of the video they claim data centers are being built in growing neighborhoods as though it's a conspiracy. Everything is being built in growing neighborhoods, that's the defintion of a growning neighborhood. Speaking "Coffee shops are growing in XYZ city" in ominous tones doesn't make it actually ominous.
They when go on to say there are 4x the data centers since 2010. Streaming TV went from 10% to 98% between 2010 and 2025. And there are plenty of other similar things (spotify, youtube, tiktok) that need data centers. In other words, consumer demand. Don't want the data centers, stop using them. I'm sure HN traffic also grew
The entire video is just digging up random stuff and trying to make it sensational. Oh, you can hear birds near data centers if you filter out the noise? That's true of basically everything, freeways, roads, bread factories, veg canners, etc... They're sensationalizing random common facts to make a ragebait video.
That and the other issues aside, I think AI companies have done this to themselves. They've gone around talking about replacing all human labor and becoming the companies that control robot god's that swallow the entire economy and put everyone out of work and might destroy man kind. Well saying that is gonna make people hate them and that will find an outlet somewhere
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
What's not to like?
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters. I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
It did not feel organic at all. It's to the point now where that initial seeding of ideas has gained legitimate traction, but the initial burst of anti-datacenter content was wild to see in real time.
Neo-luddites are usually the educated elite and genealogy is from old green or left politics but includes nationalists and social conservatives.
I think media is broadly failing to recognise this new clan.
You are again doing the thing I flagged in my original comment - the left right or progressive/conservative axis is not useful anymore. As an example: a lot of tech CEO's were originally against Trump but ended up caving precisely because the left became anti-technology broadly.
From experience and anecdotes, tech and AI optimism cross cuts into the old axis. Examples
1. third world countries are way more optimistic about AI than first world
2. many celebs (for the lack of better word) are pro AI - look at Redis, Django, NodeJS, Github
3. the existence of Effective Altruism itself should prove that this axis is useless - EA was largely leftist and support democrats while also being "pro" AI like Anthropic is mostly made from the EA cult
The nomenclature also doesn't make sense to me. Why would conservatives not conserve but rather push for progress? What are conservatives conserving instead? The academic consensus is that technology determines the societal culture and if conservatives wanted to conserve anything, they would conserve technology first wouldn't they?
And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
> And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
Thanks for proving my point, you are emphasising the exact divide I was trying to show originally. You may try to twist the rhetoric to show that you are for slow and cautionary progress of tech. That's sensible and I don't mean to claim neo-luddites would outright deny progress itself.
> This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists.
No other technology gets as much hatred as AI is getting as the public see that as a threat to their own jobs.
Of course techies here are having trouble understanding this backlash. Maybe they should read up a bit on the Unabomber Manifesto to draw parallels on the motivations of the awful attacks against CEOs recently.
Just like crypto, you cannot use it to solve social problems with technical solutions. The same goes for AI as it still requires humans and trust to use it effectively.
The more AI data centers get built, the more it is hated and the worse society gets with this loss of trust as more people read about more mass layoffs.
Once you realize:
1) LLM = CPU 2) Session Context = L1, L2, L3, CPU Cache
the entire AI industry is operating within the CPU cache of the LLM provider this is why cost moves quadratically, increases noise - signal ration, regenerative feedback loop, it dilutes the user narration, and it actually creates an architectural induce hallucination.
We've literally solved this problem in the 1960's with a memory architecture:
the OS has a memory controller, tasked with taking data from persistant structure storage (HD) loading into CPU Cache and the CPU computers, the output is stored in RAM and then moved into HD.
this is required on all AI applications, what the industry has done, is supplement a RAG which is summarizing context, however the entire context summarized chain is still being processed by the LLM.
if you employ a well sustain memory architecture you can retrieve the context you only need to feed to the llm. reduce token cost and then reduce energy therefore less demand of datacenters.
checkout my article and what i built metaop.ai it's a humble promotion but no one cares about ai memory. https://x.com/metaopai/status/2070187664192524528