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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

I believe the Russians and Chinese recognized this years ago, which is why they are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters.

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Call me a shill but I don't need foreign nations telling me what to object to when the problems caused are obvious.

Mind you, I blame governmental mismanagement of infrastructure etc just as much. The datacenters followed procedures when it comes to getting land, electricity and access to water; it's the government agencies / personnel that okayed it that are (also) to blame, and the decades of not enough investment in electricity backbone while promoting solar/EVs that is behind the Netherlands' current electrical grid problems.

(problems being that the grid is at capacity, causing a stop on new connections, with relief only slowly coming in the next decade or so with tens of billions of investments).

You could say the same about electrification of road traffic. Yes, governments slept on the electric power requirements. Yes, there are other, still unsolved issues. But that doesn't mean that electric cars are bad or not the future. The first nation to fully get rid of fossils in transportation will have a monumental advantage and dominate other countries technologically and economically. Same goes for AI. And right now China is setting itself up to be the world leader in both fields.

American Capitalists don't really need any help there; they're making Americans hate Data Centers all on their own.

If anything the Chinese and Russians made us run up our economy on nonsense AI dreams and the crash will take a decade or more to recover from.

> Russians and Chinese [...] are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters

Are they though? or is that the story the people most invested in ai have an interest in making us believe? [0]

... `it's the foreign bad guys propaganda machines making you believe your city struggling for water and electricity is a bad thing`. People as a whole may not always be the brightest, but threaten their immediate survival needs (ie; not some vague climate change most people don't understand or see, but) actual power outages, water and rolling blackouts -- people will quickly pay attention and care.

[0] https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5844328

See u/ verdverm's response, below

yes and see: https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5844328 and Occam's razor.

Russia and China are gonna Russia and China, every issue is going to have a measure of outside influence, thats just how it is now.

But them directing large scale operation forces focused on something that is genuinely bad for the people in the area of datacenters (ie, an issue that will take care of itself from within) instead of using their resources on other issues that actually need a real propaganda push? Versus the benefit of those invested in building the datacenters using fear to get people to focus away from the resources being diverted from them to datacenters?

One side has reality working for what they want, while another side needs the propaganda to turn their billions into trillions.

I think that if you compare American sentiment with Chinese sentiment you'll see that these people are really not acting in their own favor. Well, in a certain sense they are, because these companies will basically become massive institutions that share no wealth with the public and have no accountability, but in another sense they are not because without this infrastructure the US will certainly be at risk for invasion and attack by other nations, and will lose its monetary power and thus its high wages and overall global dominance. But then the issue becomes: how do we force these companies to share more wealth with the public, how do we ensure the resources are being utilized effectively and not starving or otherwise impoverishing people for the sake of profit; not, how do we stop the infrastructure from being built in the first place! The Chinese don't have this issue primarily because 1) they have a shit load of energy already, and 2) the CCP is happy to liquidate any individual that seeks personal benefit ahead of that of society as a whole, or at least the CCP itself. And the CCP has well demonstrated to the Chinese people, at this point, that if you follow them you will become wealthier. But that still means that the issue is the public conversation in the US around data centers, and that this propaganda is NOT fighting for American's benefit in any case, since having less infrastructure is not good for anyone. I am sure you can find some remote village in Africa without electricity and try and convince them that electrical lines kill birds that they hunt, and since they've never had electricity before (but they've eaten lots of birds), they'll rally against it. I see virtually no difference between that and your average American right now, except that the Americans are at least conscious enough of the extractavist enterprise which the technologically superior peoples from afar (SFO) are promising will bring wonders. And yet, India still has a more comprehensive rail network than, say, Australia; you can't tell me that isn't a strong factor in their rapid economic development.

Is there a source? Or is that xenophobia?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

https://archive.ph/yAvgz

There is no doubt an amount of xeno/sinophobia is at play as well. Russia is still killing innocent people in an illegal invasion of Ukraine, they earned their keep

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