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Or for your suggestion to “fix healthcare” - how and by whom? The solutions that those on the left push are anathema to 1 of the 2 major parties in the U.S., and the party which currently controls all of the branches of government.
My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar thing for our distribution hub, it’s south of downtown kind of in the outskirts and in an economically struggling area. Same for industrial areas, it’s usually something that’s zoned to a particular area so residential neighborhoods aren’t really affected. It’s not land where the community may benefit more by literally anything else (sometimes even a Walmart is better than a datacenter). I assume that’s where this is all headed, cities need to roll out their long term vision of where datacenters fit into their city, if at all. Until then, it’s all these small battles and the information used by opponents doesn’t really matter. If enough people don’t want it, it should probably go somewhere else. This is not serving any community benefit so I don’t see any reason why it has to exist where the developers want it to.
Expecting rational opposition is actually irrational. They just don’t want it. The why is varied and probably based more on emotion than anything else.
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.
We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.
Even for something as simple as a business that needs somewhere to run critical VDI hosts — then yes, they need low latency and somewhere that their techs can physically get to if they need to fix something.
You may also need interconnects to specific physical networks that are only available in certain places. You may need direct connections to partner equipment. This requires physical presence.
Colo space is not something you rent if a VPS is good enough for what you’re doing.
I was responding to why you wouldn’t want one in a different freakin country
The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.
Considering that the initial build out was only 10MW, it seems unlikely that was the primary usecase.
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. It's mostly trees, industrial facilities, and a train line.
The one I host at, you can’t hear from the end of the parking lot. The coolers aren’t any noisier than the ones on other commercial buildings. These kinds of datacenters are everywhere and most people probably just think they are warehouse or office building.
But the noise from computer fans and power supplies is easy to ameliorate and can be a trivial permit requirement.
The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done.
I get the water and power concerns. But (in the right locations) both are solvable. Power can be balanced with power generation (off site) especially solar and wind. Water isn't really "used" it's just necessary as a heat-sink so as long as it's available it can stay available.
Yes, govt should write permits carefully. And there are locations it is not suitable. But opposition to data centers in general is just hype.
Datacenter noise comes from the chiller units.
Given that chillers exists in lots of places it seems like this is a solved problem.
Have any of these data centers done this? All the ones I’ve seen haven’t even put up a sound baffling wall. If a data center’s owner has taken steps to ameliorate or completely prevent their negative externalities then opposition to them definitely looks like NIMBYism.
If, however, you’re just saying they _could_ prevent the problems, but then never do, I’m even more inclined to support the people telling them to fuck off.
But the point of building permits, and building regs and so on is to create requirements that let the development live in harmony with the community.
If local govt is not stipulating the requirements then that's on them.
People don't need to be "against data centers" they need to be "for no noise" and so on.
Do you not see how people might be angry at someone who dumps their problems onto your doorstep unless the government forces them not to?
The US is in a late-capitalist phase right now. It's gotten here because the voting public think it's a good thing. Every two years they go to the polls and vote for "business friendly" parties and policies. And indeed most Americans today would say Capitailism is great, Govt intervention is bad, fewer regulations gets stuff done. Anything other than rabid capitalism is defacto Communism.
And while very popular right now getting angry at all serves no purpose. When everyone is angry about everything all the time it ceases to be notable.
What is purposeful is taking an interest in local govt. It's alerting your council as to your concerns. And by encouraging neighbors to do the same. It's in thinking beyond the simplistic "pro business at all costs" rhetoric. It's understanding that current US policies, foreign and domestic, are specifically designed to make companies richer and citizens poorer.
And understand that you're not in a fight to stop development. You're in a fight to make the development work in harmony with the community, and not against it. The opposite of ugly corporate behavior is not communism.
It’s a nice analogy but it’s still people making these decisions. I will in fact get angry at someone who decides to dump their trash on my lawn because it’s in their nature to be a piece of shit. And that’s why people are angry at these data center companies.
> And understand that you're not in a fight to stop development. You're in a fight to make the development work in harmony with the community, and not against it.
Yea, and people vote to not have data centers in their towns and get overridden anyway. So now it is a fight to stop development, from the view of these people trying to stop the data centers from being built and dumping noise and air pollution on them.
> The opposite of ugly corporate behavior is not communism.
Don’t know where this non sequitur came from. At no point was communism being discussed. Being against actions of companies that have a negative impact on your life does not have anything to do with communism.
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
[1] - https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/data-center-develop...
DCs operate at the scale of agriculture, even this one will consume/expel significant resources.
Are they asking for treated water? What's the concentration of residual metals, bromine and salts? Who is monitoring it?
It's inconvenient. Think of it as tech debt. You can either pay it down now, or you pay it down later.
There is not a concerted effort to build thousand upon thousands of stockyards across the globe.
Stockyards wont increase the planets reliance of oil, since green technologies don't scale that fast. Same planet that feeling the effect of climate change quite clearly.
All for close to zero upside for the surrounding community. At least the stockyard would have given you cheaper meat. What are data centers going to give? Discount tokens?
That's why your stockyard does not have the same pushback.
Also nobody is pushing for “thousand upon thousands” of these. Again, hysteria
This sounds like a pretty good argument against golf courses. Not sure why you think this comparison put the water consumption of DCs into perspective, to me it just puts the water consumption of golf courses into perspective.
Per acre, data centers absolutely use way more water. But even then its apples to oranges. Golf courses use non-potable/recycled/grey water while data centers require really pure water (drinking water). The demand is also extremely concentrated in one spot instead of being disbursed. And, at least in agricultural land, 30-40% of the water used returns to the water table. With evaporative cooling, all of that water goes into the atmosphere.
Since more precision remedies are off the table, all that's left are gross mechanisms like bans and eminent domain.
Nobody sane would accede to admitting a new community member who is a priori immune to local laws.
Once that trust is eroded it can be difficult to get things built. If you lose trust in the govt the developer won't build. If trust in the developer is lost then permits just stop.
And yes, I think community trust in AI data centers is very low. Perhaps some more creative approaches will be necessary in the future to build up this trust again.
Data centers could be very good neighbors. They could be built in astheticly pleasing ways. They could balance elec consumption with production. They could operate cooling and simply return "warmer water" to source.
Unfortunately under the current cultural circumstances none of this can be taken for granted. Corporations have (very much) lost our trust in the effort to squeeze every last dime of profit out of everything. This is the American way.
Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.
Try to build as many new golf courses as there are new data centers going up and you might get a similar reaction...
look, i use llms for some work and for some hobby projects, but lets not pretend like the companies behind the llm bubble would ever fight fair. that would be naive to an extreme.
When we look at data we actually have [0], we can see for example AWS data centers in Oregon consumed 284,000,000 gallons of water in 2024. By their own estimate 100% of that water is typically consumed in the summer months of June, July, August, and Sept. These are also the months that farms use the most irrigation, lawns use the most, etc. Also, keep in mind that Eastern Oregon has ideal weather for evaporative cooling (specifically low humidity). Evap cooling is used for data centers in more humid parts of the country/world and can be significantly less water efficient.
The average Oregon resident uses 80 gallons of water per day, or 29,200 gallons of water annually. And if you calculate it out In 2024, AWS in Oregon used water equivalent to 9726 residents' annual usage. Is that a lot? What if you add all the other data center operators in the area? I don't know. Is they causing unrealistic pressure on aquifiers and the Columbia River watershed? I don't know either. Is the trade off of water consumption for data centers worth it? I'm not really sure how to answer these questions, but I think it starts with data center operators and their utilities being more open about their usage. Today data center operators like to compare their newest DC designs to golf courses and household use and it's not showing the full story.
[0] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/get-involved/Documents/2026-03...
However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.
This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.
This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.
[1] https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-to-resume-construction-on-wa...
*increasingly nonspecific. See [1] for example
[1] https://floodlightnews.org/ai-data-centers-texas-pollution-l...
Now China is beating us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South–North_Water_Transfer_Pro...
Nothing dumber than reallocating resources thouands of miles away from where they should be.
Liquid cooling pulls heat away from the chips. Evaporative cooling takes it out of the building.
There are alternatives, but evaporative cooling is very energy efficient.
Aren’t there real instances of metas data centers causing havoc for nearby residents? Light/boise pollution, contaminated water are real things
The water grievances are absolutely valid and so many folks here seem to have drunk the industry koolaid on it.
Closed loop systems aren't exactly green either. That water has to be pumped with anti-corrosives, anti-fungals, non-stick chemicals, etc. Eventually it turns into a toxic sludge that has to be bled about once a month. They also require significantly more electricity than open loop facilities.
this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers
if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly
regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much
[1](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/georgia-power...) [2](https://energyandpolicy.org/georgia-psc-incumbents-majority-...) [3](https://rmi.org/resources/you-might-be-paying-for-a-worthles...)
I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.
With patience, love and a bit of humor. X
Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?
Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?
Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?