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> There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all

You have to be fair on this though. The time to ban something is before they start talking about doing it, not after. Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.

I'd like to add some extra strong emphasis/support to your post:

>Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.

It's not merely "never a bad thing", for certain tools like zoning it is, at least in the jurisdictions I know of, required to be well ahead and consistently enforced. It's not something towns are allowed to do retroactively, if you have no proper legal town plan/zoning setup in place as well as various ordinances like noise then by default the only controls are the relatively weak state ones. There are many things a government is allowed to do if it's part of an overall plan that applies to all equally, but not if it's "we just don't like those guys specifically", and the best way to demonstrate that is to be making no special moves around a given arrival at all but rather to have it all setup.

Of course, there are as you suggest lots of other good reasons to be ahead too. It's a lot easier to consider things thoroughly and get community agreement when there isn't massive time pressure or lobbying going on and emotions aren't running high. It's easier to get some expert consultation at reasonable prices (in some cases there may even be community members with the skills and willingness to volunteer if it's not a time crush), to enact longer term infrastructure plans, to get any state approval if needed, etc etc. But there are legally serious hard lines as well and if towns are caught napping they may just not be able to use them at all.

The interesting thing about the anecdote wasn't the timing. It was that there was no reason to build a data center there but they felt compelled to make it their top priority.

> especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure.

Small, remote towns without electricity or data connections are not easily exploited for data centers.

I don't think anyone's talking about towns where electricity is absent or expensive.

Instead it's locations that begin with cheap electricity (attracting the datacenter) but the residents fear a significant increase in electricity costs with no local economic benefits to offset it.

Are we really expecting small town residents to have sophisticated enough prediction powers to know if a bigco company might target their town for a data center build? What's the cost of a false negative vs. a false positive for them? Better safe than sorry applies in spades here.

My take is that people feel powerless to really do anything against these massive tech companies. This is the only tangible way they can fight back.

Yea, there's probably not one single issue that people are fed up with, but datacenters have become lightning rods that represent big tech's disproportionate power over us, job-displacing AI, and are a visible example of how municipalities that we elect--serve and prioritize companies from out of town over their voters.

I might believe that if the protests weren't being organized on Facebook and then posted to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

It's more like garbage dumps. People don't want to moderate their production of garbage, they just don't want any consequences of it to be too close to their house.

"I see you're complaining about society and yet you participate in society! Very interesting! I am very smart."

This is not a good or reasoned take. People organize where the other people are because that's how you get the most people. It is nor hypocrisy to use Facebook as a platform to organize protests against other tech companies. Just as it is not hypocrisy to criticize the society you live within.

This is a very stupid observation made by people who can't be bothered to consider the realities of life away from their keyboard.

It is a good or reasoned take (but perhaps not both!). There is some sliver of hypocrisy in condemning tech companies wholesale while enjoying their products. But just because something is hypocritical, it doesn't invalidate all related criticisms. If you don't like the negative byproducts of a good or service, that's a perfectly valid gripe. But those byproducts are a necessary consequence of the status quo. In order to eliminate or mitigate the undesired consequences, some change would need to occur in the real world that would require a hitherto unforeseen innovation or it would otherwise increase the cost of providing the good or service, potentially so much so that prices would increase to undesirable levels, or it would become economically unviable to produce the good or service entirely. So without more specific criticism, and combined with polemic rhetoric, it's reasonable to assume that some are arguing that the world would be better off without AI datacenters and the models they support entirely. And if those same persons enjoy those same services, it's reasonable to sense some tension there. Maybe they haven't thought the whole thing through. I don't think it's a stupid observation.

Are they enjoying the tech companies products? They are using them, but that's a different question.

I wouldn't want a GPU datacenter close to my house either.

They should buy land in middle of nowhere, many miles from any closest town, no less than 5. And they should build and provide their own electricity.

I don't see any other solution to make everyone coexist in peace.

Imagine it was your house a mile from such a monster. Eyesore, noisy.

> What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.

What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.

Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?

And on the flip side, I live in Fairfax County, VA and there are data centers EVERYWHERE. Especially if I cross into Ashburn (home of AOL and stuff) - literally mixed in with large townhome developments.

And the current plan - building a data center in Canaan Valley - is a whopper... 785 MW natural gas power plant on site with diesel generator backups (solely for the data center, not sold back to grid), 500+ acres of land, 2 million sqft initial building space, air quality impact assessment by the state is heavily redacted, $4 billion price tag.

All right next to one of DC's most popular outdoor/skiing recreation areas. The DC would loom over the two towns that support the entire region.

>not sold back to grid)

They'd probably love to sell spare capacity back to the grid but the way interconnection is handled they'd likely be on the hook for a bunch of other upgrades to facilitate that hence why they're not.

You can't "just" add generation to the capacity to the grid without $5-15mil (could be way more but that'll usually torpedo a project) of cost.

Does a data center need to be an immediate neighbor to raise electricity rates or consume water capacity?

This is such an obvious concern that it's hard to understand how the GP didn't think of it as well. Clearly, people don't always consider all the things and get focused in so they can't see the forest for the trees.

It also doesn't necessarily matter if the data centers actually raise electricity rates.

Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.

>It also doesn't necessarily matter if the data centers actually raise electricity rates.

>Regardless of whether or not they do, you can block their construction and try to horse-trade it for relief on energy prices.

So in other words burn the credibility and reputation of whatever you're using for that purpose so you can pull a quick "fuck you got mine" to the tune of several cents per kwh off your bill.

That sort of policy making is not sustainable and is exactly the sort of selfish shortsighted thinking that birthed the current political climate.

Edit: At leas you're honest about it. The usual peddlers of such stuff are in denial about what they're doing so they can't be made to understand the tradeoffs.

As I see it, the AI companies are the ones that started the "fuck you got mine" defense. Look at how they obtained their data to train their models. Look at how they've gone about building their data centers. It's yet another example of how tech companies hurry up to get established with no regards for anything other than getting to a point of being too big to stop.

Things really started breaking down between government and big business and everyone started thinking short term at least as far back as the 1970s IMO.

I don’t think “fuck you I’ve got mine” is an apt characterization of people struggling to afford their heating bill.

If communities wait until there is incontrovertible proof of raised rates, everything will have been decided and their raised rates will be a fait accompli. This is the time and phase to raise concerns and get guarantees in place for communities

To be clear I think this is fine!

It’s rare to have leverage over capital (if indeed they do). Milk it!

It's easy for politicians to support a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody will really oppose it, and it's a safe way to appear to be "fighting for the community."

I can't speak for elsewhere, but a town near me has a few data centers, and the anti-datacenter sentiment precedes their use for LLMs.

They simply take a lot of space, and the city gave sweet tax deals, and they employ almost no one. The locals aren't happy with that type of land use.

Most of it is anti-AI sentiment, there are already a ton of people who have lost jobs, or clients to AI.

What bothers me is clearing forests, sometimes even protected forests with the idea that they'll ask for forgiveness instead of permission.

I don't think they have an interest in forgiveness. I'm not sure it's a concept in their worldview.

If you look at Elk Grove Village, Illinois as their budget there after declaring they would become the AI Datacenter Capital of the World -- there is an obvious answer:

Suburbs cannot continue to pay for their infrastructure without drastically increasing taxes or finding new sources of income.

Data centers are conflated with rising energy costs.

It's partly about people's nominal objections, but mostly an attempt to hold them hostage to extract some energy bill subsidies (and general cost of living relief).

> There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.

How did they get in?