They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.
Not everyone is a software developer.
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
The corn field is a known quantity.