One under-discussed topic is whether Americans hate data centers in their neighborhoods, or whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.
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.
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
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.
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".
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?"