Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
costar.com
costar.com
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
Wouldn't that be even worse in terms of NIMBYism?
1. Every single municipality would have AI data center "hosting in your municipality".
2. You'd have to majorly overbuild every municipality's capacity, as usage would likely have peak hours and 'dead' hours each day based on work, sleep, etc. if usage is local to that municipality.
> several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
Are you saying you believe already-built data centers are 100 times (2 orders of magnitude) as much as needed? I presume this is not what you think will actually happen in the real world though?
2. Yes. That's already the case. Today a single smartphone has enough CPU/RAM to host email services for many thousands of users. A single Netflix OCA 2U serves 400Gbit/s of video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738
The only reason we had huge DCs before LLMs was so Google/Facebook could spread their surveillance/adtech empire. Nothing of that scale is needed to provide useful services to end users.
Framasoft, the biggest non-profit host (a french FLOSS/education NGO) serves millions of users with dozens of services on 68 servers and 800TB storage: https://framapiaf.org/@Framasoft/115767718097945194
Thats exactly correct. The killer app for crypto is criminal enterprise. Yes there are other niches, but nothing that would sustain the industry.
Passing a regulation regarding mining would be difficult to enforce. It's impossible to know what a GPU inside the data center is doing.
At this point the industry is legit, even promoted by individuals in govt (who overtly sell access (cough bribe) using it. So no, you don't need to worry, there's no risk of regulations like this anywhere soon.
Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Many of the same reasons used against dense housing, mass transit, and solar/wind turbines are used against DCs -
such as claims:
* That it would be too much for the existing grid to handle
* That it would be too much for existing other utilities to handle
* That it would be too close to x other thing (zoo, etc)
* Some say it won't be visually appealing
* That it would change the nature of the existing area
* That there isn't enough groundwater
* etc.
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Wouldn't the complaints then be that a DC there would spoil the area's natural beauty (and would be too much for the electric grid there, etc)? Or if the DC were located similarly to how this one is, there would be the same complaints as OP case - see the photo at the very top of the OP article - it shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
>> even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
1. You say you would change your mind in that particular place, but are you arguing that others wouldn't NIMBY against Atherton if one were proposed there? Everyone has different ideas about where they believe should be NIMBYd, including because people have different 'backyards'? And I presume your 'backyard' is tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles from the OP DC location?
2. With state-level bans already existing in states where much of the state is very low-density, the evidence seems to show the opposite of your claim that if a very low-density area were picked then it wouldn't face a ban.
Are we actually though? I bet you heard about the Maine datacenter moratorium that passed our state legislature. It generated tons of conversation here on HN.
Did you also hear that our Democrat governor vetoed it, and it did not become law?
How many of these moratoriums are actually getting into the law?
See also, how many people here in France were jailed for sabotaging 5G antennas during their buildout.
I see very little advocating for change and a whole lot of knee-jerk reactions to shut it down.
The data center protests near me tried to complain about noise as one of their points, even though the DC was in the middle of nowhere
Or are you not concerned that AI companies are now the n°1 fossil fuel lobbyists in EU/USA? That they are consuming insane amounts of concrete and electricity for 0 gains for citizens (but enormous gains for the elites)?
I think a lot of the protestors are using data center protests as a proxy for some other belief like this. They think slowing down a data center is going to stop the future from occurring, which is an illogical fantasy on many different levels.
Nobody was going to hear it unless they drove to it for the purposes of hearing it.
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise
For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
Do you think a community is your house
We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.
>Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
Since neither are data centers, which aren’t filled with workers, you could’ve just said “yeah”
“Office buildings bring less to communities than data centers because of all the people that work in them” lmao
Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople.
These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office.
While it is a shame that tptacek has to see “commuters“ going both ways it is good to know that the people of Aurora have this beautiful park
https://www.cyrusone.com/data-centers/north-america/aurora-i...
The literal foot traffic of office workers was a major reason brought up by cities trying to force companies to RTO post pandemic.
(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)
Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right?
I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways
The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't?
> Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc?
I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice!
But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right?
Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction?
(in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?)
(Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better)
So much dead ugly space, and let’s not look at them at night with enough external lighting to see from space (almost)
But you know what is a better neighbour than a data centre or an office or a strip mall? A nice public park and local shops that support the community without you having to drive your car a distance that in any other country would be easily walkable.
Why would anybody want a monolithic megastructure sat next to their house that offers nothing good to the community itself? There is no upside for the locals. No improvement to quality of life.
A hospital and a university. And if they don't generate taxes, they should fund a welfare program too.
That is what the discussion sounds like to me.
We turned from discussing whether data centers cause concrete issues to the point where authorities should intervene, to some sort of wish list for how data centers that are constructed far away from residents should provide great public benefits.
I'm not sure data centers could make the same argument.
This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit.
I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods.
Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue.
I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?
Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.
Manhattan (or any downtown business district) has lots of office towers with little asphalt, and many (small) businesses that make their living from office workers. Perhaps you are biased towards car-centric design thinking?
Toronto (for one) has condo towers next to (or not far from) business towers so many folks can walk, cycle, or take transit as their commute. And this is not a new concept:
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you.
Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR.
I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere.
Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace.
> because someone failed to do PR
They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion.
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble.
Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties.
So you're saying that all the rules and laws and best practices that HN has cheered for over the years that apply to new construction and new industry and claim to be about sustainability and environmental protections (among other things) didn't actually do what they were sold as being able to do?
Either the new ones are cleaner (I suspect they are but the difference is probably mostly on paper), or we all got lied to.
I have personally observed this with them getting exceptions to fire codes everyone else has to comply with.
The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.)
Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem.
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s
[3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
[4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta...
The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer.
What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve?
If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them?
My understanding is this wasn't done.
> What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices?
The most understandable explanations I've heard had to do with grid upgrades. Crap the utility owns and controls and has to change to accomodate the new power flows.
More often, however, it looks like local and state government engaging in industrial policy by trying to get residents to subsidise the new datacenters.
- New DCs are going up everywhere and it’s in the media how they use a lot of power and try to negotiate cheaper everything
- People’s utility bills keep going up, particularly the transmission etc components that can’t be avoided by just buying from a different supplier
- Power utilities say they have to increase rates due to increasing demand and regulation that requires them to serve new DCs
- I know multiple people who’ve had their power shut off and can’t afford it on an average salary
So when working stiffs making $25 an hour face a $650 power bill that was $325 three years ago… yeah, they’re going to consider DCs the culprit.
Add on top of that plenty of marketing about how AI will leave you unemployed.
Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building.
New DCs should be built in Quebec next to hydro plants in places absolutely nobody lives. Or next to nuclear power plants.
They're all drain.
https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a...
The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
>Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
Most states have some form of this in general: https://www.michiganbusiness.org/services/pa-198/
What's more, having a statutory abatement is only one way to get around property taxes. What you also see are things like a industrial revenue bonds. Those don't require a special law. They just shift the tax burden to the public.
Again, the idea here is that you're incentivizing investment and that will be offset by (a) jobs created by the facility, since labor doesn't get any tax abatement or deferment, (b) they will be bringing goods and service production to the area, and (c) eventually they will pay property taxes. For something like a traditional auto factory, that's a great incentive.
The issue is that data centers have almost no local labor required. A single McDonald's is likely to employ more individuals than a data center will. And the service they provide is essentially independent of the location. It doesn't matter if it's nearby. That provides almost no advantage. And with such a small labor pool and such a large potential tax burden, there may be no economic incentive to remain in the location instead of building a new data center by the time you reach the end of the abatement.
Any source that they're confused about (b)? I believed you about (a) until I read your source- the notion that they're getting misled by construction job numbers was plausible- but I can't imagine how a government would be so fundamentally confused about what data centers are as to believe they'll provide local services or somehow goods.
What seems more likely to me is that the states/counties/cities believe that they will take in enough tax revenue while providing very little back in government resources that throwing in a discount works out just fine economically. I don't think you've made much of a case otherwise.
From my experience you’re mostly right, however it’s more like, in order of priority: power availability, water availability, data availability, land price. Cost to upgrade upstream power transmission dwarfs all other costs.
I’d note that after construction ongoing jobs are minimal. Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. And probably 50% of those are low skill/income security,cleaning maintenance etc.
But that's not out of the norm for industrial activity. Like how many people do you think are actually working in an LTL hub or a paper mill or a food product factory at a given time? Probably about the same. You can see the parking lots and count cars on Google Earth.
The towns are estatic because compared to something that generates physical emissions or truck traffic data centers are pretty clean and low risk as long as the noise can be controlled.
The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates.
50% off energy taxes.
Reduced property taxes.
I could go on.
https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo...
Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption?
A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less.
It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
A DC [can be] a good stop gap as it increases tax base for the city while not requiring additional services that cost tax dollars.
Either that, or everyone's property taxes go up.
You have something which, if it moves in, would pay more in property that than it consumes in services. Even at a significant discount to the ordinary property tax rate. If the net benefit after the discount is +$1M/year to the local coffers then the local people are benefiting in that amount, and it's easy to see numbers like that even after offering significant tax incentives.
First, Costco has some of the best employee treatment in the industry. Second, we are talking about blocking unwanted neighbors based on anything that will stick. We shouldn't have regulatory capture of socializing the liabilities and privatizing the profits, but we do and we have. Any resistance at all is by definition going to be a matter of coming at the problem sideways, up to and including fighting dirty.
NIMBY mostly blocks things that don't already have regulatory capture. Blocking things that are is fighting fire with fire.
But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes.
If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method.
I am under the impression that they are building data centers in very rural areas where as you can see there is no issue of limited land.
Whether pollution is a significant concern there, I also doubt, unless they construct a coal plant to power it.
Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
Typically server rooms are currently Fluoro-K / Novec123 if they have space constraints on the suppression systems. Those cylinders take up the least space per cubic foot of protected environments. These are less harmful than previous gasses like Halon, but still not good for the environment.
If you're lucky we get given ample room for cylinders and can go with Argon suppression systems, but that can take up more than 4 or 5 times the space alone and adds a lot of cost in engineering manifolds, etc.
CO2 takes up as much space as Argon systems and will kill someone who doesn't leave the hazard area before release so its generally not used in any datacenter project I've done.
Powerplant's at datacenters often use drychem systems instead or foam releasing systems.
Amazon also secured a 75% reduction in property taxes for 30 years.
If the options are 0 or 50% off some tax rate table, the 50% is still better than nothing.
Property Tax revenue is surprisingly tiny from data centers in Quebec. Some how DCs have low assessment for the building, like way lower then their resale value even.
> they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
Police - definitely not.
Roads on other hand, DCs are hauling new equipment / decommissioned equipment daily.
I'm in fact in favor of DCs, but tax revenue from them is not impressive at all. At least in Quebec.
E.g.,:
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt...
Raise property taxes in the burbs significantly so they can pay for their own infrastructure instead of relying on being subsidized by the poorest people in the area.
"Local businesses" are net money extractors. Local residents spend their money, a portion of which goes up the supply chain and out of the community.
Datacenters are net money injectors. Even if they provide relatively few jobs, or get tax breaks, they're still largely injecting capital that originates from outside the community.
This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers.
Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know?
> But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls
You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7.
Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.
Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
Data centers are silent in normal operation. It's the construction you're hearing about that is noisy, but that goes for any construction.
The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)
The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity.
These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
Why not batteries?
They could be training a model or two for months.
Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics.
There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.
What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places.
What exactly are you saying is baloney?
1) we’re talking about people pulling unfiltered untreated well water
2) any building would have had exactly the same effect.
And sure, a rocket launch pad would also cause issues, but now it’s a data center that is doing it, let’s not argue fictional realities.
Datacenters (1) use non-potable water during normal operation and (2) return most of the water they use to the water system, instead of consuming it (as opposed to, say, a golf course).
I have yet to read anyone more compelling than Andy Masley on this: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
(This isn’t a topic I know much about personally, so am open to being persuaded otherwise!)
AOC is fantastic, but her name doesn’t automatically lend credibility to an argument, certainly not one backed by actual primary sources.
2. The existing homeowners were there first. Their community has a commitment to ensure that the largest expense they will ever have, their home, is fit for purpose and not impacted by those that come after. If I move next to an airport, can I just have the airport shutdown? No. But a datacenter can just make homes un-inhabitable because 'that's just how it goes'? BS.
This is normal operations being done irresponsibly:
1.) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/meta-datacen...
2.) https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/saline-township-residen...
> flushed bacteria-contaminated water into public sewers
I do that every morning
With lithium or whatever, in your waste…
1.) All bacteria is far from equal.
2.) Some of this wastewater is not problematic because of bacteria, but metals and other things - and some is being pumped into streams, not water treatment loops.
For a moment I was worried that this might be an average that includes indirect usage through industry and agriculture, but AFAICT no, it's in line with just residential usage, so good-on-ya for that.
> I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here
The utility claims it was 30m gallons over 4 months [0], and 90mgal/yr would be like ~3k individuals. This seems pretty significant given that Fayetteville is only about ~20k residents. [1]
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/fayettevillecit...
Average use of water per capita in Spain is about 47m3 a year, so a third of the USA. And that number is quite consistent around the EU, except for Greece and Cyprus, where it's about double or even a bit more.
Keep in mind that a lot of Americans outside of urban areas also get their water from their own private wells, making water use effectively moot.
US usage stat [0]: 82 gal/ day /person
Days to years: ~ 30,000 gal/ year /person
To metric: ~ ~113.4 m^3/ year /person
It takes so long to build trust. It takes seconds to obliterate it. And big tech as a whole has been obliterating it's trust for like... a decade now.
You can't just isolate AI data centers, or even this potentially not-AI one, from everything else and be like "well opposition to this normal thing is ridiculous." Yes, it might well be. However there has been a pattern of abusive behavior on the part of AI DCs ranging from:
* Getting zoning approval seemingly against the will of a preponderance of local citizenry
* Taking water, or in vastly more quantities anyway, without permission
* Tapping water sources they weren't permitted for
* The above two of which, I'm pretty sure were only found out when water pressure started dropping in people's homes
* Similar to the above, energy demands causing residents to be told to turn down their air conditioning, during a heatwave no less
* Resulting in large scale change to the places people live, irrespective of benefits, that they didn't ask for, had no say in, and especially given it's for AI, likely have strong feelings about
* The general vibe lately that big tech is above the law, not just zoning laws but seemingly any laws they believe "stifle innovation"
Like, you can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And you can take this even further, expanding beyond just AI into things like the ongoing scandals with Flock cameras, Big Tech's involvement with Israel and it's war, the ongoing scourge that is social media, alongside the old classics: products are broken all the time, services are shut down with little warning, the price of every piece of tech and software seems to constantly be rising, many of which have become more or less essential to life, and at the top of all of these companies are, reliably, the richest people on the damn planet, who seemingly are only getting richer, all the time. TWO of them have their own SPACE programs for goodness sakes.
Like I'm sure the majority of people here especially see these things as progress, even aspirational, or at worst, a cost of doing business. What a lot of the public sees is a massive cohort of bullies and oligarchs, seemingly accountable to no one, who are so rich that they can simply ignore laws they deem beneath their ambitions with the pleased signoff of their government. That's not a good situation and simply saying "well they're just dumb luddites" is not a solution.
This shit is unstable.
People don't see tech as a benefit anymore, not remotely the way they used to anyway. It feels more and more like any time these companies make their presence known in your life, it's a threat to you, or things you care about. And if these companies don't start taking that seriously and try to mend some bridges, I think we're about to see the temperature really start to rise.
It’s indisputably true that a data center tapped a water supply without the supplier knowing about it and it caused water pressure in surrounding homes to drop:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...
Whether it was a “material amount” of water is pretty irrelevant here. “affects my home water supply and they didn’t pay for it” makes it plenty material for voters and just feeds into the existing narrative that these companies are stomping all over the will of everyday people.
> You can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And, really, I don't think it's that their water usage is uniquely terrible, I think it's far more that their water usage feels unnecessary which goes back to the AI not doing much for regular people issue. Most people see AI features as intrusive nuisances, and even in the best of circumstances, a huge AI DC is going to need a lot of water, both directly for cooling, and indirectly via it's demand to the power grid. Virtually every method aside of solar we use to generate power requires pretty substantial amounts of water, if for nothing else than to boil it.
That doesn't mean that data center is using a huge, unbelievable amount of water, it's that whatever water it is using, which we know is at least substantial, is water that could be better used for other things. Nobody bats an eye at the amount of water used to make concrete or grow food or raise livestock, because we have to get around and build things, and we have to eat. But if you have this tech which is seemingly a lightning rod for nonsense that needs it's own special data centers that use tons of the stuff... people are gonna say something.
I don’t see DC water usage to be a problem, currently.
It’s amazing how Karen Hao managed to graduate from MIT without learning the difference between m^3 and L
Just like everything else, it depends! There are designs that don't really use that much water, but there are also ways to build these things that absolutely destroy the local water supply. It's a legitimate concern that shouldn't be a deal killer without any discussion, but it also should be discussed and considered and understood how any given project is planning to use water
Has this happened somewhere?
Turns out they could not get enough water from the local water utility and a ground water source was not clean enough so they had to build a water pipeline all the way to a neighboring town to supply water for the chillers
This is what I was talking about, depending on the HVAC setup it may be closed loop but also it could be evaporative swamp coolers that just absolutely destroy a ton of fresh water daily
Companies often want to put data centers in the rural parts of blue states (like the southwest of Minnesota, where I live), where the locals are much more red and skeptical, if not outright hostile, toward renewables.
Isn't it technically legal, but obviously offends the spirit of the law (and being a good neighbor) by driving a bus through a loophole?
So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure.
Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness.
So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.
It is central to both OpenAI's and Anthropic's stated mission and either CEO has been discussing this repeatedly.
Examples:
For OpenAI, we have here an "AI job transition framework": https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_...
Anthropic has "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"
Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.
The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.
I'm skeptical that they're actually surrounded by American prairie. What are the addresses of some of the data centers you're talking about?
Edit: I just see traditional American landscaping surrounding the CyrusOne data center in Aurora. I don't really see any native forbs or native grasses and it has a bunch of trees... where's the prairie?
The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.
The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.
Why should any of us have to put up with evil? Why do the poor bear that load more than the rich?
But also there’s no prairie around there. At all. What year were you last out there?
And there's counterexamples to the desolate office space... the Ace Hardware corporate office[2] I think is remarkably pleasant.
I wonder if these "classic projects" have been morphing into jet engine projects as energy use vs energy available have changed.
personally datacenters have affected you and me: ssds, hard disks and memory are super expensive; electricity costs have gone up
Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).
Many of the people now extremely opposed to data centres seem to believe the UK didn't have any data centres recently, never mind that you can pass by data centres in e.g. London Docklands and mistake it for an office building. In some cases they are in a subset of floors of office buildings.
I'm all for regulating them so they need to account for externalities, but the blind opposition to them is frustrating, not least because it means there's no pressure to deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects.
Two counterpoints:
- the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
- for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
It may be in both, but there certainly are gaps in regulation as well. E.g. a new concern here is the effect on energy prices, where regulation to force large data centre projects to fund sufficient improvements to energy infrastructure would address it. But sure, it won't help if the regulations aren't enforced. That's seemingly a bigger concern in the US than in the UK.
E.g. we have at least two projects in London alone where waste heat from data centres will be fed into district heating loops. Using the planning process as a means to mitigate concerns with these projects works when the will is there and the regulations allow for it.
> - for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
The point is that if the angry mob points at X while the problem is Y, the angry mob isn't likely to get anything resolved even if/when politicians are sympathetic. If anything else, if your cynical about politicians: If a mob is focused on the wrong target, how likely do you think it is that a politician will try to find a way to take advantage of that rather than patiently explaining why they're focused on the wrong issue?
The problem is not more data centres. The problem is noise, water, energy. That problem is both not unique to data centres, and also not something that is an issue with all data centre projects. The right way of addressing that is to ensure that externalities are addressed and mitigation paid for irrespective of what gets built.
(The water issue doesn't pass the smell test for me because I expected data centers to be closed loop, but if it does apply? London is currently on a hosepipe ban!)
Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.
Fixing regulations for that to require demonstrating commercial arrangements to fund additional supply to mitigate cost would address that, however, and that'd be a broader social good: Start out with the assumption that anything energy intensive must cover its externalities. Then you can selectively drop those requirements for things you consider sufficiently beneficial to justify socialising the cost.
More general-purpose regulations would be better, but local authorities can already to a large extend address this as part of the process of granting (or not) planning permission.
Regarding the water issue, it is real in places where it is insufficiently regulated - it's cheaper to dump the water many places. But it absolutely can be closed loop, and you can get district heating out of it. You just need to make the demands.
> Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.
Absolutely. But I also think that peoples real concerns will get harmed from going after data centres with arguments that are easy to dismiss instead of directing the criticism against the real issues.
By bringing jobs to a struggling city in their industrial district?
... said nobody, until now
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.
I bet nearby rail yard produces way more loud noises.
Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.
Noise absorbing panels block airflow, if you didn't know that. Useless for AC.
I'm willing to bet that you can make the exhaust noise near inaudible if you want to. Problem is, it costs a couple 10k dollars or so, and why pay for that if you can just fuck over the neighbour instead?
Analysis of sound performance on Tesla valve principle-based model: Experimental and simulation approach https://doaj.org/article/8cfc59ce5f59454e856e5b2fb613372a
:P
But I think even with just a basic understanding of physics its clear that something like this could work. It also does not have to be a Tesla valve precisely. There are all kinds of mufflers and some of them can no doubt be applied at industrial scale - if one is willing to pay a reasonable amount of money.
Tell that to the residents of Memphis.
A fun story, for electric generation, Washington state produces and exports a lot of electricity because they are blessed with convenient hydropower. But WA still don't want to build data centers for some reason, even though they a the best positioned to.
https://www.threads.com/share/BAQzYUI7Nf/
There's another account that I thought was something like @stopdatacenters but I'm having trouble finding it atm
Happened to lots of influencers during the whole vax debacle of COVID. Mostly sane people who didn't catch a big break until they mentioned there might be mercury in the covid vax. Five years later and they are still tugging those lines.
There is lots of land outside the city but then you can't piggyback on infrastructure so it is more expensive. That's my primary objection - if this is so important why not spend the money to put it somewhere it is likely to have less of an impact on your neighbors?
Can they break those promises easily?
Sure, you can sue, but while those suits move through courts, everyone else suffers.
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
If you believe corporations are people.
Even billionaires really don't operate as individuals, they are a monster that we've let grow to have unchecked power across the entire federal government.
(note, I may be agreeing with what you're saying I just don't agree with the framing of the "individual") Most of the pushback belongs against the entities that are more powerful than even the federal government at times.)
I don't know of any other way the government makes money other than riding on the back of corporations.
So yes, from the governments POV, using eminent domain to make corporations richer also has the direct effect of making the government richer.
Just think about it a little bit.
On the other hand, I guess the vast majority of politician incomes come from corporations.
EDIT: Also, if there were no big corporations, people would still work and pay taxes. No sane statesman would purposefully build their countries economy on non-state-controlled megacorps.
Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound
> In late July, the Metro Council approved new zoning and related restrictions on data center development and implemented a moratorium on new permit approvals to run through Dec. 1.
I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.
It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.
Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.
But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).
It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.
I spent most of my IBEW apprenticeship working in data centers of all sizes (5-300,000 sqft), and micro co-location facilities (like DCb's) are entirely different from the likes of the AWSes and cryptomining operations of this world (250,000sqft+).
Happy for the zoo exhibits/animals, but this particular co-lo wasn't even among the egregious data center owners.
----
My recommendation to data center planners: small cities have cheaper land, and lots of love/power/cronyism. You may get further by buddying up with the smaller fishes/communities.
When a new DC is being proposed, how do you tell - for sure - whether it'll be quiet and discreet, vs. loud and noisy?
You look at the proposal/RFQ/zoning.. ?
Are you asking something else (that I am "missing")?
>The 60,000-seat stadium is projected to cost $2.1 billion, including $1.26 billion of public money—the largest stadium subsidy in U.S. history.
I'm not joking. This is the reason I heard for them making it smaller.
The local government has a degree of autonomy, but there are unspoken checks on it by a generally hostile state government. Nashville is represented by Democrats while the state is controlled by Republicans. There is an implicit threat that if the city fails to pursue the state's objectives the state will punish it.
Recently the city angered the state because it refused to hold the Republican convention. The state retaliated by passing a law to shrink the Nashville city council and another to take control of its airport. The state also took control of the Nashville tourism board that has a slush fund paid for by city taxes.
There is a direct line between state reps and local politicians. So for example when state lobbyists were angered at the loss of parking due to a bike lane they called up a council member to have the lane removed.
Which is all to say that the stadium deal was ordered by the state and not something the city had a real say in.
If the datacenter people go and cozy up to the governor or legislators the state will lean on the city again and they will ram it through as well.
The current climate around seems very sudden.
Is it?
Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.
AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.
Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.
I get the background story but the response to a very specific thing seems sudden regardless.
Sorry to be snide - you can certainly make an argument that the demands of AI should not affect public perception of data centers, but you should simply make that argument, rather than mysteriously omitting any reference to the issue.
I can hear it approaching from a couple blocks away. I'm sure my dog and other animals hear it much better than me.
Does it have to?
I meant, it is a very common problem with lots of complain. I bet modern electronic can do it much less noise.
Does HN know something in this area?
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
Exactly my sentiment. I don't even understand how this is controversial. The only ones who don't seem to get it are everyone making the plans (including the folks in government)
They're just trying to reduce the risk and lead time to gain an advantage. I'm a huge AI supporter and there's no way to advocate for them. They've just blown all the good will out of the water.
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
People love to pretend to care about animals.
It is also a place where the next generation can learn the wonder and beauty of nature.
They also tend to work closely with conservation efforts worldwide.
So... yeahhh, no. Not at all the same.
The Millenium Scholarship program in Nevada paid for tons of kids' education by taxing casinos. It's not perfect but it's channeling economic activity to the people.
That gives the local voting population the ability to decide how much they're willing to put up with data centres. And a state that has excess water and electricity can have tax breaks and then that's where more data centres go.
Pay the citizens the price, or don't burden them in the first place. There are two options, and the data center builders may pick either.
More sources
1785853372 | Metro Council approved efforts to use eminent domain | https://www.wkrn.com/video/metro-council-approved-efforts-to...
1785900180 | Metro Nashville Council Marathon | https://www.wsmv.com/video/2026/08/05/metro-nashville-counci...
1785912178 | Metro Council approves eminent domain to buy proposed data center land near Nashville Zoo | https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/zoo-council-v...
1785922740 | Metro Council approves eminent domain legislation for Nashville Zoo data center | https://www.wsmv.com/2026/08/05/metro-council-approves-emine...
1785929744 | Metro Council approved efforts to use eminent domain | https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/metro-council-approved-eff...
1785933000 | Council OKs eminent domain action for proposed zoo-area data center site | https://www.nashvillepost.com/politics/council-oks-eminent-d...
1785936000 | Council OKs Eminent Domain Action for Proposed Zoo-Area Data Center Site | https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/metro-coun...
1785938700 | Nashville Council passes mayor's bid to acquire zoo-adjacent property | https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2026/08...
1785942026 | Metro Council approves eminent domain to acquire land near Nashville Zoo from data center company | https://www.newschannel5.com/videos/news/metro-council-appro...
1785949424 | Metro advances eminent domain effort to try to block DC BLOX data center | https://wpln.org/post/metro-advances-eminent-domain-effort-t...
1785953564 | Moving forward with eminent domain may mean proposed data center 'unlikely' Metro Councilman says | https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/eminent-doman...
1785957300 | Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo | https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2026/08/05/counci...
1785963278 | Metro Council approves eminent domain to acquire land near Nashville Zoo from data center company | https://www.newschannel5.com/news/metro-council-approves-emi...
1786017061 | Council approves O'Connell's eminent domain plan | https://www.axios.com/local/nashville/2026/08/06/council-app...
1786022777 | Council approves O'Connell's eminent domain plan | https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/policy/nashville-...
People are royally pissed off by the sheer arrogance of these data center people and Silicon Valley assholes who think they can just impose their will on places.
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].
The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].
Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_dynasty 2. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...
My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk.
If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want to live in Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon's Borg cube you're in for a few rough decades, on both sides of the political spectrum that is.
Quite convenient how the same people trying to run roughshod over the others to get these bubble mania mausoleums built NEVER live near them but are HAPPY to make others who can't afford a second home live next to them.
But I don’t fault them even if they’re misinformed. AI is a big power grab by the wealthy and people feel helpless and are acting in the only way they think they can.