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One _extremely_ rational and common reason that people oppose these projects is that they can bid-up the energy cost in their regions, meaning that one of the residents biggest monthly bills gets bigger.
A second one goes around pollution and noise, particularly when the AI DataCenter is using "portable" gas turbines or similar.
Solutions are hard, but possible... so long as the decision makers are able to recognize that much of the opposition is quite rational, and that the deals struck need to accommodate the legitimate and rational concerns, while avoiding getting hung up by true nonsense.
It's relatively easy to avoid being that egregious about it if you're a little bit patient on construction permits and power contracts.
NIMBY opposition to datacenter construction is orthogonal to that, except insofar as in both cases the construction will gravitate toward places that won't or can't object to the construction.
Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.
1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)
2) your example primarily used undesirable land.
3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.
4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.
All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.
Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.
Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.
(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")
It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there.
The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area.
Agreed on the tax abatement stuff. Those should be outright illegal regardless of industry.
I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely).
Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.
I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.
I'm pretty sure the utility where I am has been able to get rate increases approved partly based on rising prices they have to pay to buy power on the wholesale market when they do not have enough capacity of their own to cover all their customers.
I never once noticed significant noise from any of them - they are nearly all on the opposite side of a wide road from the nearest housing, and the road is louder than the data center. There is enough electric supply in the region that they almost never run the gas turbine generators.
As a way of growing the industrial tax base of an area, they are one of the least dirty ways to use industrially zoned land, though they don't produce as many long term jobs. There is a big data center construction and design industry in that region, and it did pull Amazon to open HQ2 nearby, but those are both first mover effects.
Electricity should function as a common carrier like any other utility. If you want to pay for the watts you get the watts regardless of who you happen to be.
It’s a non-issue. It’s like complaining about a vacant but well maintained warehouse next door.
If you mean living next door to a power plant? Absolutely. But that is a different topic.
It’s not a non-issue right now.
Issues around the cost of infrastructure upgrades being spread over all rate payers are not universal, and can be corrected.
It’s quite the thing to say it’s irrational whilst acknowledging you are insensitive to sounds.
misophonia can be severely disabling. Good overview: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-s...
I've personally had a friend with misophonia (about subsonics) commit suicide (making it difficult to find out from them what was cause or correlation).
The exact opposite is typically true, so this is surprising to me!
If you don’t know where I live how can you know if my claim is true or not?
I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.
I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.
Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.
I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.
If you want to find locations of grid instability focus on growth, both residential and industrial, that is radically out of scale compared to larger geographic averages. Otherwise, it seems like you are measuring using the wrong trends.
What’s crazy is that the grid instability was there before the explosion of data centers and the primary revenue generator of the much larger geographic region is energy transport/production.