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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?

Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.

The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor"

https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-progr...

When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer.

I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now.

For me, noise would be my first concern

industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits

honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour

If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe?

But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?

a couple things to note that complicate it:

* a bunch of places didn't have the foresight to actually put buffers between industrial and residential zoned areas (either due to space limitations and/or poor planning)... sometimes people only notice when the empty lot they lived next to for a decade actually gets something built

* currently some protests are whipping up enough fervor where location doesn't really factor, people are fighting against any data centers within city limits at all

> I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too

If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.

It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

If you want people to be more supportive of it, there are pretty direct ways to do that. Donate heavily to the local community to make up for impact, build new power plants for the project to pay for itself, don't put in gas powered generators, stay away from housing...

The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.

Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777

Reading only the abstract: "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach... We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."

I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?

Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped.

That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers.

(* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)

Which power utility do you use?

Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price?

Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.

Or because people see:

1) their electricity bills rising

2) their land prices (read: rent) rising

3) actual fucking nutjobs in charge of these companies who can't seem to simply not say actual nutjob shit all the fucking time

4) entry level jobs disappearing

5) the obvious fact that "I am building the most powerful technology ever" means "the already-powerful people who own these technologies and companies are working to become vastly more powerful"

And I say this as someone who uses and loves using AI heavily across both my personal and professional life. It's better to grapple directly with the fact that people have very legitimate fears and concerns around this technology and the people who own it.

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