All data centers that are in controversial areas should offer free heated swimming pools for the neighborhood. You could add a giant pool complex as a percentage or two of the cost of a big data center.
Even smaller data centers will be producing enough waste heat to heat 10s of thousands of homes. So why not make residents love you by funding the installation of a district heating system which gives your compute power a symbiotic relationship with the community. Their energy bills go down naturally because your cooling efforts are heating their homes and cooling their homes and you spend less in the winter cooling your servers because that heat is being distributed throughout the community.
It doesn't even have to be free district heating/cooling, just cheaper than using electric or gas heaters.
Data centers were, and still can be, some of the cleanest industrial facilities - but the ones being built in this AI wave are not, because they are being built as cheaply and as quickly as possible and without regards to proper infrastructure.
That’s every local investigative journalist’s wet dream. Can you link us to a source please?
PS saw an interview with he who shouldn’t be named and they made an interesting point that there isn’t a way to scale the manufacturing of gas turbine blades, there will never be enough gas turbines for these DCs to come online as scheduled.
"Mississippi officials told xAI it could run the generators without an air permit because they were deemed “temporary” and “mobile” units.". Makes sense because as far as i can tell they were on trailers.
but then there's this: "But lawyers at the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the NAACP in the federal lawsuit, have long maintained that such a loophole doesn’t exist, and that running such turbines without a permit violates the federal Clean Air Act.
“Mobile, temporary, portable, whatever you want to call them, turbines need air permits,” Patrick Anderson, a center attorney, told Mississippi Today."
as per typical, it's not clear who's right
https://mississippitoday.org/2026/04/15/data-center-turbines...
Rural land is cheap and there are fewer neighbors to annoy with the 24/7 construction activity.
Elsewhere, e.g. in London, Docklands is both full of high density data centres and high-end residential buildings and offices that could certain use the waste heat in winter at least.
Most of the data centres there just looks like office buildings on the outside, and most residents won't know they are there.
There's plenty of free parking, free admission, giant pool with some small waterslides and stuff, a bunch of picnic tables and public barbecues, generally some nice greenery and trees for shade, ponds and fountains and stuff, a bandstand, etc.
It's not somewhere you'd pop over to for a "quick swim", but especially for lower income people it's a great place to have around as a "grab a pack of hotdogs and your swim trunks and make a day of it" sort of thing. As a kid we couldn't afford to, say, go to the actual waterslide park or anything so I have a lot of fond memories of visiting the steel plant.
I'm sure the construction and upkeep was less than a rounding error in terms of construction and upkeep costs for the plant itself.
free hot tub
free publicity and good will gathered
("free")