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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I’m fine with datacenters being built as long as we have some rules: they have to be quiet enough to not be audible beyond the border of the land owned by the datacenter. They have to pay for new electrical capacity so that they don’t burden locals with that externality. Really, that’s it. I think most people could get behind that.

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Theres always going to be some negative externality effecting people that live near anything getting built. Even if the operational data center isn't loud enough to be heard beyond its property lines, the construction process will be louder. I'll also negatively effect peoples views and cause generally increased activity in the area.

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.

Does anyone have any numbers on what percentage of recent datacenters don't follow those rules? Those are completely reasonable requirements. But, the high-pitched online discussion tends to imply building a datacenter requires doing everything the worst possible way every time.

I know there are problematic data centers. I just want to know what the stats are vs. the rhetoric.

I don't have all the numbers but as someone who lives in VA and has had their power bill _double_ over the last year, I'd be hard-pressed to think DCs are commonly paying their fair share when tariffs like this need to be passed: https://virginiamercury.com/2026/08/05/scc-orders-dominion-t...

They also cover acres of ground with impermeable surface so if they are in an area where rain runoff is an issue they should have to mitigate that also. Maybe they could collect the water to use for their cooling needs.

That isn't how water cooling works.

Land disturbance and rainfall/runoff/watershed considerations are literally part of the permit processes for any building?

No. If they still draw an enormous amount of water, that's the finite resource that's getting wasted no amount of money could immediately retrieve. Paying for electricity doesn't mean the resources are not shared.

My understanding is that the water argument is the weakest one - the water is given back to the city, it's not like it's used up. And using water for cooling is one of the "cleanest" uses of water, it's not like toilets or showers.

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.

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