I think it can't be categorized as NIMBYism because the underlying sentiment is not just no data centers in my backyard, but anyones backyard. It's about the AI project itself, even if it expresses itself differently for a local context.
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.
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...
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.
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.
NIMBY may be the incorrect term, but objecting to building something that raises your electricity bill extends how far your “back yard” goes. Objecting because it raises your ram prices extends that to a global scale.
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.
whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.
Or the increased pollution (air, light, and sound) from having a warehouse-sized building of GPUs next to you. I'm already annoyed by my neighbors having spotlights pointed at their own houses or leaving garage lights on through the night that shine in through my bedroom windows.
Im wondering why the typical design is a warehouse with horizontal sprawl . Wouldnt it make sense to go vertical up or down .
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.
Coming from a construction family, the saying oft heard saying was "it's more expensive to build up than out". Also, zoning codes can set limits on how tall of a building can be built. Four stories is a common limit which also happens to coincide with the max height for a timber construction is also four stories. If you're out in the 'burbs, you probably wouldn't want to see a random 10 story boring windowless concrete building sticking up somewhere.
Definitely cost although your idea does sound more attractive. A small footprint much further away from the boundary than normal. You could even make them look nice but since demand is massive and timescales so long, I think anything that might take longer is a "no".
At least in my part of the US, the datacenters built (and planned) are not running their own gas generators, but are just as hated here as they are most other places due to the other adverse impacts they have.
Probably, but that isn't the problem people have with gas generators. Musk is running 30 of them 24/7 to power xAI because there isn't enough grid capacity in the area, and he removed exhaust filters for efficiency and gave several entire towns permanent chronic asthma from NOx poisoning.
I don't really think it's about the adverse impacts.
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.
Are you talking about the Box Elder County Stratos project? I did some digging into that. AFAIK, they are mostly going to be powered by a natural gas pipeline. I haven't heard of them using nuclear. Got any links?
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.
I think the “in their neighborhoods” thing is really the key. These things have got to be poison for property values. Younger, less wealthy people have economic anxiety about AI for fear of displacement and oppose data centers on that basis - more data centers = more AI. Older, wealthier people have less intrinsic reason to oppose the technology. But anything that threatens property values, be it a data center, a jail, a landfill, et cetera, must be resisted at all costs.
Would they hate them as much if they were in a Chinese neighborhood? Why not build in China? We say there's not much jobs here anyway, and that it's all negative externalities.
People are going to assume any data center project will have all the worst possible qualities. And a this point I'd say they're justified given how much dishonesty and corruption has been flying around. I don't envy any company that's being open and taking steps to mitigate issues because all the others have caused this hostile environment.
The typical inhabitant of a town that is a good candidate for data center construction is suspicious of authority, hates big tech companies, has heard AI is coming for their job, and consequently not a supporter of data centers, regardless of how they're powered.
I'm sure there are various reasons why specific individual Americans hate data centers, but in the aggregate I think the main unifying force is that Americans hate the rapidly growing (and already larger than the gilded age) wealth inequality that is making their lives shittier if they don't already own significant capital.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That Saline datacenter is the one I live closest to. I actually know a couple people who live right next to it. The above is basically what happened, but done in the open after that first lawsuit, to the tune of "do what we say or we'll sue you into bankruptcy and then get our way anyways".
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".
I think it’s just a breakdown of trust in the government to weigh the interests of the builder and tenants of commercial / industrial properties against the local community. When it seems like government doesn’t have your back in negotiating and enforcing the details, people will fall back to a “default deny” stance to exert what control they have over the process.
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…
I do like living and working in buildings, using computers, refrigeration systems and transit infrastructure, getting medical care, and eating cooked food, so I think building things is by far a net positive.
Also, banking, scientific research, offsite backups, and the internet have been very useful, so data centers are pretty great.
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.
A paper factory, on the other hand, smells like barf and has huge vats of chemicals that will dissolve you. It probably uses also more power than a data center, at a much worse power factor.
I used to work two lots down from one. I wouldn't notice at all if it was next to my house. The only way to distinguish it from any other business in the office park was the slightly higher security. There was also a charter school next to it, and it was much more disruptive than the data center.
That's dismissive to my point. Society built itself up. Corporations that suck on society's tit and give nothing back, demand profits, and continue to skim off the top are not Mother Teresa.
Because ultimately those things (apartments, high-speed rail, mines, factories, datacenters, etc) exist for the benefit of the public.
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.
Nonsense. Who consumes the goods produced by the factories and mines? Who lives in the apartments and takes the high speed rail?
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.
> Who consumes the goods produced by the factories and mines?
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.
> Automation is also a massive boon to the common man.
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.
Whether data-centers and AI are actually beneficial is still somewhat of an open question with large groups on both sides. So unclear how beneficial data centers are to the general public.
The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
Billionaries like Kevin O'Leary and his ilk are behind those rumors because they want to discredit the local resistance. There's one activist in Utah, Caroline Gleich, has been exceptionally outspoken against O'Leary and he's said she's part of Chinese led resistance. It's pure insanity.
> The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
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.
I’m extremely suspicious of this, but have no way to prove it or collect data related to it.
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.
Zoom out and ask yourself which injustices the popular voice care about and which they don't.
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.
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.
There are plenty of reasons to be against datacenters and I see some people trying to say the possibility that it's foreign influence illegitimates the opposition.
In fairness, a lot of Red Scare propaganda did stem from grounded and realistic espionage concerns.
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.
I wonder, if indeed there is astroturfing going on, if instead of a foreign actor it’s competing AI companies. Eg OpenAI astroturfing opposition to when Anthropic wants to build a datacenter, and vice versa
Nope. People don’t want them because they fear the DC will further increase utility bills. These companies openly talk about eliminating their jobs via AI with glee. Why would anybody help them? They are against the average persons best interests for their profit.
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.
I can't think of a faster way to permanently solidify someone's opinion than being told "you only have this opinion because an enemy foreign government told you to; get your opinions from your friendly local government instead."
Of course a company like X has an incentive to push a narrative like that, given their AI position. People are concerned about their property values, utility prices, etc. It's not hard to see why the average person doesn't want one of these built in their backyard.
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.
No. First, it will censor you for any number of reasons, but it's a shadow censor so they can point you to your own post and say it's not censored since you and anyone you share the link to can see it. Second, it's known to be manipulated. A few years back they accidentally leaked that one of the key factors influencing a post's ranking was - I kid you not - whether Elon posted it. I'm sure they've only gotten better at manipulation since then.
These data centers will be a net loss for people, higher electricity cost, pollution, etc... The idea that if you don't comply with big tech plans, you are being dissuaded by a foreign entity is dumb at best. Simping for billionaires and their plans, won't make you one of them.
We see the same thing in the UK and probably lots of countries. Data Centres are large, expensive and secretive so most people will have all kinds of theories about why they are to be resisted at all costs.
* 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.
> 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."
Clearly hyperscalers are seeing datacenter commitment exceeding demand, and are now running PR campaigns to have the public push back against construction to get them out of their contracts.
Joking conspiracy theories aside, perhaps the over-commitment was part of the plan with the expectation that there will be rejections from government
Coming from a third world country (emerging/developing for the sensitive souls) .. and having many friends from former Soviet countries, one thing we all seem to agree on is the sheer luxury rich countries have .. it’s like a cancer of prosperity .. where a society becomes so successful that it starts attacking the very things that created its success ..
Interesting video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bbe-Ev-Yns) explains how water consumption is a nearly fixed unit per DC and will be the major limiting factor in DC growth. The physics of heat removal requires water at one stage or another (evaporative cooling at the DC, or cooling the power plant to generate power to dry-chill at the DC) and we have a finite amount of water.
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.
It's sad. For all the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity (or lost it long ago), we can't even handle some of the lightest industry possible. A big building that hums and releases slightly warm water, and the only sector in which we could still be called a world leader.
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.
All hours humming is absolute torture and anyone who dismisses it has lived a very privileged life. Low humming penetrates walls, goes through ear plugs, and can be felt by the body. It carries for miles. It's inescapable. It makes it impossible to focus. It ruins sleep and destroys health. If I were the CIA and I wanted to demoralize a population and also cause a violent uprising, I'd have low bass humming constantly howling in the background within earshot of residential areas.
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.
Why wouldn't we lament losing it? If all else was solved, a DC is just as valid industry as any other. The fact that the provided service is nonphysical doesn't matter - every industry is different. Should probably pay taxes though, and not terrorize the neighbors.
If only datacenter developers started with the tax and power arrangements we wouldn’t be where we are.
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.
> It's sad. For all the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity (or lost it long ago), we can't even handle some of the lightest industry possible. A big building that hums and releases slightly warm water, and the only sector in which we could still be called a world leader.
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.
They used to bring lots of jobs which didn’t require specialization. That’s not saying they didn’t have real negative impacts but that people were more willing to accept that as a tradeoff when it was a middle-class living for an entire neighborhood. Data centers are getting resistance now because anyone who lives nearby is getting pollution and higher prices with no compensation: they’re not going to work there and it won’t employ enough people to even boost home values.
> The point of industrial capacity is a positive externality for the country not that it makes someone's backyard prettier.
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.
Technologists would be thrilled to build them in California? This is such a weird and fake criticism, California has driven manufacturing and industry out of the state, SF tech companies don't want to build in Nevada, they are forced to by regulations.
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
You can see this as an American thing if you want... but you might look at the rest of the world to ask whether you're trying to convince the world to un-invent gunpowder.
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 think it can't be categorized as NIMBYism because the underlying sentiment is not just no data centers in my backyard, but anyones backyard. It's about the AI project itself, even if it expresses itself differently for a local context.
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.
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...
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.
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.
NIMBY may be the incorrect term, but objecting to building something that raises your electricity bill extends how far your “back yard” goes. Objecting because it raises your ram prices extends that to a global scale.
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.
Im wondering why the typical design is a warehouse with horizontal sprawl . Wouldnt it make sense to go vertical up or down .
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.
Coming from a construction family, the saying oft heard saying was "it's more expensive to build up than out". Also, zoning codes can set limits on how tall of a building can be built. Four stories is a common limit which also happens to coincide with the max height for a timber construction is also four stories. If you're out in the 'burbs, you probably wouldn't want to see a random 10 story boring windowless concrete building sticking up somewhere.
I see you've been to Avalon Studios.
Definitely cost although your idea does sound more attractive. A small footprint much further away from the boundary than normal. You could even make them look nice but since demand is massive and timescales so long, I think anything that might take longer is a "no".
It's cheaper to build out rather than build up. Datacenters are mass dense so building up requires thick floors and supports for the upper floors.
At least in my part of the US, the datacenters built (and planned) are not running their own gas generators, but are just as hated here as they are most other places due to the other adverse impacts they have.
Aren't all DC equipped with gas generators as backups? And they have to run it for an hour every quarter to make sure they work?
Probably, but that isn't the problem people have with gas generators. Musk is running 30 of them 24/7 to power xAI because there isn't enough grid capacity in the area, and he removed exhaust filters for efficiency and gave several entire towns permanent chronic asthma from NOx poisoning.
I don't really think it's about the adverse impacts.
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.
Are you talking about the Box Elder County Stratos project? I did some digging into that. AFAIK, they are mostly going to be powered by a natural gas pipeline. I haven't heard of them using nuclear. Got any links?
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.
They are being built to support an industry which is itself an adverse impact.
I think the “in their neighborhoods” thing is really the key. These things have got to be poison for property values. Younger, less wealthy people have economic anxiety about AI for fear of displacement and oppose data centers on that basis - more data centers = more AI. Older, wealthier people have less intrinsic reason to oppose the technology. But anything that threatens property values, be it a data center, a jail, a landfill, et cetera, must be resisted at all costs.
Would they hate them as much if they were in a Chinese neighborhood? Why not build in China? We say there's not much jobs here anyway, and that it's all negative externalities.
And also their electricity bills rising because of datacenter power demands.
People are going to assume any data center project will have all the worst possible qualities. And a this point I'd say they're justified given how much dishonesty and corruption has been flying around. I don't envy any company that's being open and taking steps to mitigate issues because all the others have caused this hostile environment.
Seems there is opportunity for a company to rise to the top if they take a stance that buys societal goodwill.
But then they wouldn't make a profit.
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.
The typical inhabitant of a town that is a good candidate for data center construction is suspicious of authority, hates big tech companies, has heard AI is coming for their job, and consequently not a supporter of data centers, regardless of how they're powered.
I hate that I am subsidizing the power bills for these data centers.
So you would support the construction of data centers with completely off-grid power sources that you did not subsidize?
Didn't think so.
What about my comment gave you the confidence to (incorrectly) answer your own question for me?
I want to see large investment in mass produced nuclear power plants, enabling us to do exactly what you are suggesting.
Oh boy. I can't wait to see what the people who remove the exhaust filters from their gas turbines would do with a nuclear plant.
What a goofy comment.
"I hate that my tax dollars were used to bomb Iran"
"So you would support the bombing of countries that aren't Iran?"
It was actually "so you would support a billionaire bombing Iran with his own dollars?"
I'm sure there are various reasons why specific individual Americans hate data centers, but in the aggregate I think the main unifying force is that Americans hate the rapidly growing (and already larger than the gilded age) wealth inequality that is making their lives shittier if they don't already own significant capital.
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.
> 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.
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.
That Saline datacenter is the one I live closest to. I actually know a couple people who live right next to it. The above is basically what happened, but done in the open after that first lawsuit, to the tune of "do what we say or we'll sue you into bankruptcy and then get our way anyways".
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".
How much copper do you reckon is inside it?
If there's one thing Americans can agree on, it's that we don't like building things.
I think it’s just a breakdown of trust in the government to weigh the interests of the builder and tenants of commercial / industrial properties against the local community. When it seems like government doesn’t have your back in negotiating and enforcing the details, people will fall back to a “default deny” stance to exert what control they have over the process.
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…
Why should we? Corporations steamroll the public, take their tax breaks and ask for more.
I do like living and working in buildings, using computers, refrigeration systems and transit infrastructure, getting medical care, and eating cooked food, so I think building things is by far a net positive.
Also, banking, scientific research, offsite backups, and the internet have been very useful, so data centers are pretty great.
May they build a data center next to your home.
It's always nice to be close to things we cherish dearly.
There is a data center in my town.
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.
A paper factory, on the other hand, smells like barf and has huge vats of chemicals that will dissolve you. It probably uses also more power than a data center, at a much worse power factor.
There's stuff in my town that I don't mind being there, but they are "over there" enough not to bother me.
I used to work two lots down from one. I wouldn't notice at all if it was next to my house. The only way to distinguish it from any other business in the office park was the slightly higher security. There was also a charter school next to it, and it was much more disruptive than the data center.
That's dismissive to my point. Society built itself up. Corporations that suck on society's tit and give nothing back, demand profits, and continue to skim off the top are not Mother Teresa.
Because ultimately those things (apartments, high-speed rail, mines, factories, datacenters, etc) exist for the benefit of the public.
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.
"Privatize the profits, socialize the losses"
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.
Nonsense. Who consumes the goods produced by the factories and mines? Who lives in the apartments and takes the high speed rail?
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.
> Who consumes the goods produced by the factories and mines?
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.
>Not all consumption is good.
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.
And there we have it. Corporations must have unlimited rights because, and I quote, "You're not my mom."
> Automation is also a massive boon to the common man.
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.
Whether data-centers and AI are actually beneficial is still somewhat of an open question with large groups on both sides. So unclear how beneficial data centers are to the general public.
"take their tax breaks"...
What exactly do you think a tax "break" is?
The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
SV has done enough to influence Americans to hate them without the help of foreign enemies.
https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbgvTlt1VB8
Billionaries like Kevin O'Leary and his ilk are behind those rumors because they want to discredit the local resistance. There's one activist in Utah, Caroline Gleich, has been exceptionally outspoken against O'Leary and he's said she's part of Chinese led resistance. It's pure insanity.
Classic red scare.
“Oh, you hate the military industrial complex? What are you, a Pinko?”
Literally felony contempt of business model
> The rumor is going around on X that foreign enemies of the US (especially China) are trying to influence Americans through social networks against building data centers.
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.
I’m extremely suspicious of this, but have no way to prove it or collect data related to it.
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.
Zoom out and ask yourself which injustices the popular voice care about and which they don't.
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 don't think outside intervention is necessary.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGxmCvLb9bs
There are plenty of reasons to be against datacenters and I see some people trying to say the possibility that it's foreign influence illegitimates the opposition.
This wouldn't be the first time that homegrown dissent was characterized as foreign meddling. Red Scare is back in vogue.
In fairness, a lot of Red Scare propaganda did stem from grounded and realistic espionage concerns.
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.
This does more to discredit X as a trustworthy source of information than anything else.
I wonder, if indeed there is astroturfing going on, if instead of a foreign actor it’s competing AI companies. Eg OpenAI astroturfing opposition to when Anthropic wants to build a datacenter, and vice versa
Nope. People don’t want them because they fear the DC will further increase utility bills. These companies openly talk about eliminating their jobs via AI with glee. Why would anybody help them? They are against the average persons best interests for their profit.
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.
It's of course entirely believable that they would do this. Why wouldn't they?
I can't think of a faster way to permanently solidify someone's opinion than being told "you only have this opinion because an enemy foreign government told you to; get your opinions from your friendly local government instead."
Of course a company like X has an incentive to push a narrative like that, given their AI position. People are concerned about their property values, utility prices, etc. It's not hard to see why the average person doesn't want one of these built in their backyard.
Their position is to build the data centers in space, so apposition on the ground plays directly into their hands!
Why would you believe anything posted on X? The platform deliberately promotes misinformation, and has for years.
> deliberately promotes misinformation
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.
No. First, it will censor you for any number of reasons, but it's a shadow censor so they can point you to your own post and say it's not censored since you and anyone you share the link to can see it. Second, it's known to be manipulated. A few years back they accidentally leaked that one of the key factors influencing a post's ranking was - I kid you not - whether Elon posted it. I'm sure they've only gotten better at manipulation since then.
These data centers will be a net loss for people, higher electricity cost, pollution, etc... The idea that if you don't comply with big tech plans, you are being dissuaded by a foreign entity is dumb at best. Simping for billionaires and their plans, won't make you one of them.
An unsourced rumor going around a notoriously right-wing social media site? Definitely credible.
This is basically a content-free comment that only serves to rile up the community.
Is the left wing really any better?
I'm not here spreading unsourced rumors from "the left."
Information of this sort should come from journalists, not vibes on social media.
We see the same thing in the UK and probably lots of countries. Data Centres are large, expensive and secretive so most people will have all kinds of theories about why they are to be resisted at all costs.
* 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.
I'm surprised they haven't tried painting them "Go Away Green", vs stark off-white monoliths.
https://themeparkarchitect.com/go-away-green-disneys-paint-c...
I don't think that would work. Per your article:
> 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."
In that case, try the "Blue Cube" method, like the old Onizuka Air Force Station near Moffet Field.
https://heritageparkmuseum.org/blog/what-is-the-blue-cube
Clearly hyperscalers are seeing datacenter commitment exceeding demand, and are now running PR campaigns to have the public push back against construction to get them out of their contracts.
Joking conspiracy theories aside, perhaps the over-commitment was part of the plan with the expectation that there will be rejections from government
Coming from a third world country (emerging/developing for the sensitive souls) .. and having many friends from former Soviet countries, one thing we all seem to agree on is the sheer luxury rich countries have .. it’s like a cancer of prosperity .. where a society becomes so successful that it starts attacking the very things that created its success ..
AI data centers aren't the source of America's prosperity. In fact many arguments can be made that they will contribute to its loss.
I respectfully disagree
Interesting video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bbe-Ev-Yns) explains how water consumption is a nearly fixed unit per DC and will be the major limiting factor in DC growth. The physics of heat removal requires water at one stage or another (evaporative cooling at the DC, or cooling the power plant to generate power to dry-chill at the DC) and we have a finite amount of water.
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.
It's sad. For all the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity (or lost it long ago), we can't even handle some of the lightest industry possible. A big building that hums and releases slightly warm water, and the only sector in which we could still be called a world leader.
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.
All hours humming is absolute torture and anyone who dismisses it has lived a very privileged life. Low humming penetrates walls, goes through ear plugs, and can be felt by the body. It carries for miles. It's inescapable. It makes it impossible to focus. It ruins sleep and destroys health. If I were the CIA and I wanted to demoralize a population and also cause a violent uprising, I'd have low bass humming constantly howling in the background within earshot of residential areas.
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.
A building that makes no physical products and has barely any workers isn't the kind of industry we lament losing.
But I would say datacenters are fine if they're prevented from screwing up electricity prices and have proper pollution controls.
Why wouldn't we lament losing it? If all else was solved, a DC is just as valid industry as any other. The fact that the provided service is nonphysical doesn't matter - every industry is different. Should probably pay taxes though, and not terrorize the neighbors.
If only datacenter developers started with the tax and power arrangements we wouldn’t be where we are.
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.
> It's sad. For all the lamenting that the US is losing industrial capacity (or lost it long ago), we can't even handle some of the lightest industry possible. A big building that hums and releases slightly warm water, and the only sector in which we could still be called a world leader.
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.
Most industry doesn't bring positive externalities for those nearby. What does a paper mill bring?
They used to bring lots of jobs which didn’t require specialization. That’s not saying they didn’t have real negative impacts but that people were more willing to accept that as a tradeoff when it was a middle-class living for an entire neighborhood. Data centers are getting resistance now because anyone who lives nearby is getting pollution and higher prices with no compensation: they’re not going to work there and it won’t employ enough people to even boost home values.
They should pay high taxes or something. Or come with a swimming pool powered by waste heat.
Or why not build then in China? Isn't that the better solution? Are you okay with that backyard?
The point of industrial capacity is a positive externality for the country not that it makes someone's backyard prettier.
> The point of industrial capacity is a positive externality for the country not that it makes someone's backyard prettier.
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.
Technologists would be thrilled to build them in California? This is such a weird and fake criticism, California has driven manufacturing and industry out of the state, SF tech companies don't want to build in Nevada, they are forced to by regulations.
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
You are a voice a reason.
I for one am not surprised.
It may have been the AI CEOs bragging that they’re going to take everyone’s job away.
Maybe one day, Silicon Valley will learn that their insufferable arrogance is not a virtue for everyone outside of their bubble.
You can see this as an American thing if you want... but you might look at the rest of the world to ask whether you're trying to convince the world to un-invent gunpowder.
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?
All your comments are just China China China China China.
AI as envisioned by billionaires is pretty stupid. I think we'd be better off if we tricked China into building it.
I’m not asking anyone to do anything.
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.