Hacker News Reader

Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.

View on HN

Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.

Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.

Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.

The problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities. The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity. The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource. The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com