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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.

Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.

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It's extremely easy to see in Silicon Valley. Go to the planning meetings of Hayward, where recently a handful of activists with a history of opposing everything came to oppose a long-planned data center that did their EIR and interconnect request back in 2023. In 2024, local journalist described the data center as "beautiful" and the mayor called it "an incredible space". But now, activists show up to denounce it as a Satanic outpost, because they got whipped into a frenzy on Facebook.

Or maybe they’re upset that the plan for AI to justify the trillions of sunk cost had to include massive layoffs and replacement of jobs with machines. That may not bother you, but it hardly takes a “Satanic frenzy” to dislike that prospect.

More realistically imo the sunk cost is just sunk, but who wants to be the town buying into a gold rush that’s already showing signs of being a bit overblown.

99% of data center space has nothing to do with AI and is just the consequence of the long trend of flight from corporate data closets to central facilities and clouds.

Yeah no. Almost everything people are pushing back against is branded as AI data center expansion. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need net new data centers being build… that’s just workloads moving from one data center to another.

Obviously you're welcome to whatever beliefs comfort you, but most data centers that are anywhere near anyone are not related to AI, largely because AI applications are not very sensitive to latency and don't need to be near users. The specific one in Hayward I mentioned is advertised for corporate IT, as is another one in Pittsburg (California).

Anyway the projects should not be adjudicated based on what happens inside. They should be judged on whether they pollute and make noise.

You’re clearly ignoring the context of “new and rapidly built” and are instead using the metric of all data centers in existence.

You’re technically correct, but missing the point and imo arguing more or less with yourself only.

But we are talking about new data centers that are usually being built for the exact purpose of housing AI facilities? I'm not sure why you are being so obtuse about this point. Stating what already exists in data centers in general misses the point, either in ignorance or you are just being disingenuous. Given that you don't seem ignorant, it leaves the rest of us with the belief it'd only be the latter.

No way. DCs and DC expansion existed before AI but they were inconsequential. What's new is the massive ones being built by the lowest bidder solely for AI. For a working template look at the xAI one that gave an entire town asthma, but luckily most of them overrun cost and get abandoned.

You would reasonably ask how a datacenter, of all things - one of the cleanest industrial buildings - can give an entire town asthma. And the answer is that there wasn't enough electricity available in the region so Elon rented all the temporary gas turbines he could, and set them up in the parking lot to run 24/7. Since they're designed to run one at a time and only in emergencies they don't meet ordinary NOx pollution regulations, and a whole bunch of them in one place emits enough NOx gas to severely hurt people. Elon doesn't care.

The Army should just shell that place, but Elon's crimes are not mainstream data center projects. I don't think we should allow someone to just set up a gas pipeline and open the valve, but I also apply this logic proportionally to major polluters like cars and airplanes and non-IT grid loads that rely on fossil fuel generators.

Recent survey showed on HN that 60% of adults in the US dislike it which means that 40% either don't care or like it 40 is a massive number, you're not that far from a coin flip.

I don't think any of us have a good read on how people feel because the vocal people are very vocal. Here on HN you'd guess everybody hates it or loves it and there are a bunch of us like me that just view it as a tool with consequences that are currently not understood.

There is such a massive amount of propaganda out there about everything, do you really trust anybody's read on a tech we've never seen before? I don't. How many people are actually well-informed?

In US politics at least that’s plenty to shut things down, which is exactly what’s happening.

Your closer to a 2/3 and 1/3 split then a coin flip with 60%.

You handwaved that 40% to a positive. This could easily mean very few people have a positive view of AI.

The only point I was making is that 40% is a huge number.

60% is a 50% bigger number than 40%, so I don't understand your point at all.

Generally, in American winner-take-all politics, 60% is considered a massive landslide.

I love AI assisted learning and code generation - absolutely despise AI “art” though - image, music, written word, video. If AI was just being used to get shit done efficiently, what a dream that would be, instead we are generating infinite mountains of useless bytes to suck people’s brains out in TikTok feeds and annihilate access to original thoughts in a Google search.

> 40 is a massive number

Where does that leave 60, then?

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