Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are getting built
cnn.com
cnn.com
But that all seems fine as long as not egregious. But for anything to get built, housing or data centers or what not, we have to accept that those right next to any building project will experience some negative externalities.
Personally I am much more concerned about datacenters that take it upon themselves to burn natural gas. And noise. Noise pollution can actually be detrimental to your health, and there's basically no mitigation that exists. So we really have to look at noise.
I know there are problematic data centers. I just want to know what the stats are vs. the rhetoric.
- The major Electrical provider has a terrible track record for improving overall reliability of service to local homes. The average outage time is 3x the normal average, and the percentages for rate increases always favor corporate customers vs residential. Yes, Residential often has more 'long tail' cost in outage scenarios but it should be better balanced IMO. but also our grid seems to be a bit stressed and adding that additional stress is a big concern.
- The water usage for these data centers is an unknown, and sure they can do a closed or mostly closed loop but we aren't getting any promises on that. My state is lucky enough to have a LOT of water around it, but we also have awareness about what industrialization has done to those waterways and the ecosystems that live in them. We don't need more problems.
- In fact we actually have an issue where communities have newish data centers, that frankly have ggravating shrill sound at all hours. [0] [1]
How many of X/Amazon/Google/Anthropic/OpenAI data centers have been blocked? I’m going to bet that number is close to zero for any important projects they were planning, likely because they were approved before the real regulation pushes started.
Both sides are getting played with the same song that ends in AI regulations, which is bad for people and good for profits.
It’s all strategy and theater so people can find alternative cause to latch onto that can be steered so it doesn’t really hurt the big players but will ultimately lead to more regulations (and thus more profits).
I get this isn't your primary point, but this line suggests people would have otherwise thought AI was good if it wasn't for some devious party convincing them otherwise. This is definitely not my read on the current environment. People think AI is bad because of its badness. The slop, the automated responses, the help bots, the being replaced at your job, and so on are just not popular.
whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.
Smaller footprint if insidea a metro area by having a skyscarper type data center , as i recall AT&T used to have such windowless anonymous buldings scattered in some cities for their equipment. Or have a Silo type structure going down if in a more rural area to not blight the landscape.With added advantage of dampenig on the sound pollution (although not sure what effects a humming underground building will have on subterrerean life).
Probably cost? All those would cost more that the biz are willing to spend , while putting up four walls and a roof is ordeers of scale cheaper.
as i recall AT&T used to have such windowless anonymous buldings scattered in some cities
for their equipment
Actually, Americans hate Silicon Valley and AI, the data centers are just a concrete proxy: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...:
> It’s A.I. as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.
> And I think that’s also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It’s not just: It’s going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers.
> ...
> And what happened? The data center developers sued Saline Township, a town of, again, a few thousand people, saying: Wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can’t have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant A.I. data center developer, they just settled.
> They were just like: Fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools, and this fight is not worth it to us. But that, to people, felt like a profound violation of little-D democracy.
> It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is: You have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politicians. They don’t tell anybody else what’s happening. The politicians aren’t allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision-making process, and they themselves work out a deal — a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side — that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality, into the world that these tech companies have decided for you.
> And so I think that the data centers, in that sense, are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that A.I. is showing up in their lives.
Mist recent, the datacenter's cost has shot up to ~50 billion, fow which they decided they wanted a tax break of 50% for 12 years, and it was granted using the same methods.
also, they named the datacenter project "The Barn" as an extra slap in the face, like look at how quirky and rural we are. I would actually have more respect for them if they had named it "Fuck You Saline".
That one in utah everybody hated was gonna be built in an empty valley. There would have been no impact to neighbors because there weren't any, and no impact to the grid because they planned to build their own nuclear power plant.
It is in a remote valley. And, it's going to use less groundwater than the previous use of the land. The only things to really complain about are huge amounts of gas consumption and AI bad. If the locals pinned them down to building out solar and mini-nuke power, the only thing left would be AI bad.
Didn't think so.
I want to see large investment in mass produced nuclear power plants, enabling us to do exactly what you are suggesting.
"I hate that my tax dollars were used to bomb Iran"
"So you would support the bombing of countries that aren't Iran?"
At a national level, the political establishment is doing nothing useful to fix this problem and is instead making things much worse. Many people are very upset about this, but it is is going to take years to fix this problem electorally (though I do believe it is possible for this to happen, given all the recent evidence that giant political money spends on status quo candidates are increasingly not working and arguably starting to have the opposite effect of being toxic for the candidates who receive them).
Data centers are a flashpoint of leverage where the rightfully pissed off populace has the ability to use local political power to take a stand and throw a wrench into the system today rather than 2/4/6/8 years from now.
This whole thing is highly speculative. Most of the buildings won't get any use, and the ones that do will be strictly the ones with the lowest costs.
We give tax breaks because we recognize that these things are beneficial to the economy and want to incentivize their construction. Some countries go even farther and directly subsidize development.
So many of these things DON'T benefit the public, especially as automation reduces the number of jobs they produce. They mostly benefit the capital holders and they'll take steps to increase their profit even if they hurt the public in the long run.
Automation is also a massive boon to the common man. It's the only reason we're not both dirt farmers right now, and is responsible for most of the increase in standard of living over the last two centuries. Your views are short-sighted.
Not all consumption is good. It can harm health, relationships, etc. And many goods have been ravaged by planned obsolescence and other corner cutting such that we're forced to consume more to maintain status quo.
> Who lives in the apartments and takes the high speed rail?
This is frankly an entirely different class from mines and factories. While there is "NIMBYism" over both, the reasoning for it can be vastly different.
The reason I started my comment with "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses" is not because we shouldn't have any mines or factories or apartments or high speed rail or automation. It's because our corrupted system means the negative impacts of them is felt more by the public while the positive impacts are concentrated in fewer people. Automation that enriches everyone is great. Automation that leaves people destitute is not. These things don't just naturally end up on the positive side.
That's not your call to make. If I am willing to spend my hard-earned money on a thing, it's because I think it will improve my life. Who are you to tell me otherwise? You're not my mom.
And it is not true that we "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses". Bailouts are rare exceptions; in general, investors take the loss when a business fails. They are last in line in bankruptcy court and cannot be insured.
> That's not your call to make.
That's not your judgement to make. First it's patently false in almost every modern society (there might be some with literally no restrictions on private ownership, idk), and second everyone can come to their own conclusions.
I for one am glad we don't have 8-year-olds enjoying one last smoke before an entire day in the mines, and if we did, I wouldn't let you tell me I can't say whether that's good or bad. You're not my mom.
So much so, that we aren't allowed to download and finetune the model weights that we helped to train?
When OpenAI and Anthropic start begging Uncle Sam for bailouts, I'll be voting to let them go bankrupt. There's no love for companies that leech off of the common man like this and then beg for more tax money to larp as a profitable company.
America's AI corporations are not your friend. They're not as friendly as Apple or Google were, because those companies depended on a positive B2C business relationship. OpenAI and Anthropic both grovel at the feet of the government and eye an IPO at the same time. It's pathetic.
What exactly do you think a tax "break" is?
Also, banking, scientific research, offsite backups, and the internet have been very useful, so data centers are pretty great.
It's always nice to be close to things we cherish dearly.
I drove by it and don't get the fuss. It's a box in an industrial park. It makes a little bit of noise but not nearly as much as the paper factory next to it. People just like to whine.
There are plenty of corporations that I haven't had a great time with, so I just don't do business with them. Amazon's marketplace search doesn't support boolean operators and their sort by price feature doesn't work, so I buy from eBay instead. Wal Mart doesn't have as good of products or as helpful of employees as WinCo, so I buy from the latter.
The only corporations that I've had bad experiences with but continue to patronize are: Comcast, Wells Fargo, and PG&E. Just because they treat me horribly doesn't mean I blame any of their wrongdoing on the other corporations I do business with. Their use of tax breaks is far from the worst problem. They all have contracts with various government organizations which force me to do business with them, when I would leave immediately if I had a choice.
Granted, I've had much better experiences with those three than with Department of Motor Vehicles and the Franchise Tax Board, so I'm probably better off with those agreements in place than if the government organizations themselves were providing internet access, servicing my mortgage, and suppling natural gas. Then again, what is a government except the most powerful corporation?
I don't like doing business with corporations that have police and an army backing them, but otherwise the rest of the corporations I deal with have been great.
I think we’re seeing this in a lot of aspects of society. Commercial interests have pushed aside all other stakeholders in the power structure and people are increasingly resorting to brute force methods to express their grievance. Replacing city council seats over single issues, cutting down Flock cameras, etc…
McCarthyism was a total overreaction in hindsight, but had roots in pervasive foreign meddling. For the past 100 years, America has been a target of influence campaigns from both foreign and domestic organizations.
Even more, I’d really doubt that is a US interest to let the public know if such campaign is happening against non-US countries, so I don’t expect Meta, X or whatever to kindly inform me about that.
There is a hard to miss tendency for the things which get the most noise to be the most useful to national adversaries.
You can't mention specific incidents here for comparison because the comments will be filled with disagreements and accusations about the specifics not the big picture.
Search yourself for things that are getting attention and not getting attention and judge for yourself how useful each would be to external powers.
I think it deliberately avoids censorship of any kind, which makes it both more open to truth (if anyone posts it there) and more susceptible to manipulation.
“Oh, you hate the military industrial complex? What are you, a Pinko?”
When I see stories about how a hardware startup like SpinLaunch has had to move over and over because no matter where they go, locals flood the town hall meetings to declare their relatively boring technology is too scary, I'm not surprised town halls are being flooded over AI datacenters.
This is basically a content-free comment that only serves to rile up the community.
Information of this sort should come from journalists, not vibes on social media.
It’s debatable if a DC will affect local energy costs but people don’t want to risk it. Big tech has lost all their social capital. I would say at this point all of corporate America has. They have too much power over the public. People are starting to push back.
X is owned by a guy who builds data centers.
Also I don't trust rumors that oh-so-conveniently support the interests of some very wealthy people doing unpopular things. Heuristics say it's probably propaganda planted by their PR operations, and they do not get the benefit of the doubt.
And guess who has been boasting about replacing workers and making everyone unemployed by 2030? Certainly not china.
Maybe they say different things domestically but I don't even recall any Chinese AI personality going around preaching about the upcoming AI doomsday while also building the doomsday device themselves, either.
* Job attrition because "AI". * Blamed for high energy prices * A totem for high wealth individuals * A lot of building for not that many jobs * In small countries like the UK, some are a massive blot on the landscape compared to their surroundings
Oh, but at the same time, we want everything to be cheaper. But not with AI. Or Data Centres.
https://themeparkarchitect.com/go-away-green-disneys-paint-c...
> While many theme park fans may initially believe there is only one ‘magical’ go away green color that was developed by Imagineering, that couldn’t be further from the truth. There are a plethora of varying shades of green hues developed and utilized by Walt Disney Imagineers, and other theme park designers, depending on the theme park’s location and surrounding color palette.
There's no color that would make an building that takes minutes to pass at highway speeds "go away."
Long term, the goal for this buildout is to drive millions of people out of their livelihood. But maybe a rogue AI will go nuts before then and become even more catastrophic.
So people are looking around, seeing their physical space being worsened in order to make their digital lives worse, with the possibility of much more misery to come. No kidding they aren't a fan.
It's interesting that the companies building these haven't even tried to smooth over the public relations until recently. I get it, this is all terribly exciting for VCs and a subset of techies, but their inability to even comprehend the objections shows what an extreme bubble they are in. The rest of the country gets a vote, and snidely dismissing everyone else as a knee jerk NIMBY, or Chinese shill, or illogical moron isn't going to convince anyone.
Remember HN -- this applies to most of you, too
Joking conspiracy theories aside, perhaps the over-commitment was part of the plan with the expectation that there will be rejections from government
Maybe one day, Silicon Valley will learn that their insufferable arrogance is not a virtue for everyone outside of their bubble.
If China gave superior paid offerings we might just start transferring all our data over to them instead. Anyways, have we considered building our compute infrastructure in China's backyard instead?
I’m saying the AI industry created their own problems by thinking the general population would eat their shit with a smile like their sycophants do.
For a bunch of people that considered themselves smarter and better than the general populous, they don’t understand people very well.
AI as envisioned by billionaires is pretty stupid. I think we'd be better off if we tricked China into building it.
Instead of trying to find property tax arrangements that work to give municipalities a big payoff, and power supply arrangements that could be an opportunity to boost the green and nuclear sectors, we have political hobbyists jumping on a bandwagon of misinformation.
But I would say datacenters are fine if they're prevented from screwing up electricity prices and have proper pollution controls.
Huh? Sure but that's not what I was talking about?
> Let's start by dismantling the one serving your internet connection.
There's a huge gap in explanation for how you got here. But home internet connections aren't served by data centers anyway.
I just said it's not relevant to "the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity".
No. Data centers have very, very few positive externalities for the people who live around them. They employ very few people, use a lot of infrastructure and resource, to provide services for people far from the community.
And on top of that the technologies they enable are loudly marketed as things that could destroy us all, or at least take most of the well-paying jobs.
If they're so great to live by, build them in Atherton.
Yeah, that' true. What's the problem with building them in Atherton, then? The nation will get the same positive externalities if they're built there.
Hell, build ones ringing the houses of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Larry Ellison has a whole island that could be filled with data centers. Seems like those are the best places for them.
Everyone wins, right?
I'm tired of the "some of you may suffer, but that's a price I'm willing to pay" BS.
Like, none of the things you proposed doing are legal in the jurisdictions mentioned. It is NOT LEGAL for Sam Altman to build a hyperscale data center in his backyard. It is NOT LEGAL for Larry Ellison to build a hyperscale data center on his island.
It's bad to criticize people for not doing things the legal system prohibits them from doing
I'm certain none of the people actually ordering these things would be thrilled to have them anywhere near where they actually live. If they could build them in California, they'd find some rural area or poor neighborhood to drop them in.
> Like, none of the things you proposed doing are legal in the jurisdictions mentioned. It is NOT LEGAL for Sam Altman to build a hyperscale data center in his backyard. It is NOT LEGAL for Larry Ellison to build a hyperscale data center on his island.
Oh, how very convenient for them.
How about they sic their lawyers on California to make it legal, instead of some rural county government? Get an initiative on the ballot rezoning a billionaires' actual places of residence and adjacent land for datacenter construction, and flood the airwaves supporting it. Make some campaign contributions!
And that's after a decade of companies "abandoning" the state.
Years ago, I lived in a town where low humming would start up in the early mornings and go for hours. It drove me insane with the back of my mind trying to figure out what was causing it while simultaneously trying to ignore it and failing. I moved far away but sometimes I hear a rumble that goes on a little too long and that sense of dread starts to creep back into my mind.
If only the LLM-peddlers didn’t slurp up all tech supplies using VC money leaving regular people scraping up a small fortune for a heavily used DDR3 1GB stick, we wouldn’t be where we are.
Even if people weren't protesting DCs, we would hit peak DC when we run out of water, which isn't far off. A major drought will likely disable large amounts of the economy that depends on AI that depends on water.