We do not have a eunuch congress - but we do have a Congress that believes their balls have been removed despite being there the whole time. This is a solvable problem, happily. It does, however, require some will and for folks to remember they actually have some power as elected representatives to the highest legislative body in the land.

What reigning in would you do if you had the power to do it for the US?

You gotta stop saying each party like they’re both the same

I’m sorry but I’d like specifics - there are too many environmentalists hand-waving.

This is a well established playbook - it was used with nuclear. It’s being used with oil transport.

It’s literally the same script.

How is this different than a cornfield? A data center is probably a better neighbor because it doesn't kick up dirt, pesticides, and fertilizer into the air.

Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.

You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.

Even if you do want datacenters built in your country, you probably don't want them built at the maximally explotative locations that their developers pursue.

They don't provide appreciable community value and they effectively mine limited local resources (power, grid capacity, land, water) and sell it as compute, immediately diverting the profit back out of the local economy and into very distant business accounts instead.

Builders choose their targets specifically by how well they can strong-arm weak/vulnerable communities into letting them build these mines through political influence and misrepresentation. It's bad.

What you probably want is to leverage their global market value to establish new power and grid capacity in undeveloped areas, perhaps to someday become a seed for new communities that grow around the infrastructure development work.

But that's much more expensive than bullying and seducing a weak city council so it won't happen with regional/state/federal regulatory protections or incentives that push them away from the exploitative opportunities and towards the constructive ones.

Why should I think that I "own" or control a datacenter built in my town compared to one built in another country? It's pretty unlikely anything I do will have any effect on what goes on inside one even if I work there.

The greatest control I have is probably to have it not get built, though even that is minimal as it has failed to stop the one that is indeed being built in my town.

For people worried about their livelihoods, there's value in slowing AI adoption to give our economy time to transition rather than just throwing a lot of people out of work all at the same time.

Yes, it is vital to create more slop and Anime figures. We need to win that race at all costs.

So urgent that Andreesen has a Super PAC to push the dangerous China narrative.

Counterpoint: Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.

There's no such thing as 'control over AI'; that goes double for someone who is a complete nobody plebian with a little baby stock portfolio. You know, basically everyone except for a select few.

You could say the same of human intelligence and competence and social trust.

I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.

> rural red states where they welcome the construction

The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.

> data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction.

There’s no such thing as a red state or blue state, these are fictions created to generate political fighting for no value to society.

Second - many states such as Ohio have begun pushing back strongly against data centers. In Ohio we had been offering tax breaks for construction because we welcomed the economic activity, but thankfully the government here after seeing a lot of pushback across the state has realized providing tax incentives or subsidies is economically and politically stupid relative the benefits of the new data centers.

To your point, they can be built anywhere. So many folks are saying yep, let’s build them somewhere else and drain water and raise energy prices there instead of here.

Smart politics in a state like Ohio would require data centers to relocate corporate jobs to the state or face full or perhaps even surcharges for utility rates because why not?

Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.

As far as I can work out, tokens aren't fungible which makes them a pretty poor thing to tax instead of just taxing the profits of the companies behind the models.

> data centers can be built basically anywhere

this is especially true for AI use cases, where compute is hugely more important than latency / bandwidth

> you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.

So, reallocate some exec comp to a pool that gets bigger when you give shareholders back money?

Would be great to balance the market better between labor and capital, but there's no easy button...

> The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage.

What about self-hosted models?

It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.

On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?

If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?

In many places there is little excess capacity. Many protesters know that their electricity prices, like gas prices, will soar and price them out of AC.

Well, no.

First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.

Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.

Politicians are bribed by these companies, so why would they price electricity correctly?

This is one way you know billionaires have too much sway over the government.

Yeah whenever I hear someone say this I can’t help but think they are delusional. Like, have you looked around? What rational person could possibly believe this tech will lead to MORE freedom.

Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?

> The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.

The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.

It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history.

Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information.

The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.

This. 100% this. Data centers drive up our energy costs and are external to the local economy for the most part.

Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states)

RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.

I think a lot of the cost increases come from utilities being in bed with government and both going "aha we've found our scapegoat" more than the demands of the data centers themselves.

But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.

> 2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities.

Best part is when they figure out how to take their $10-20k donations to the local community as "doing good" and turn it into positive PR spin to the local yokels that don't know any better that they're getting robbed blind daily. They have a full playbook to rob local communities and get them to fall for it and it sucks.

I've watched it happen in Upstate NY and we certainly aren't seeing any benefits of any of it.

Data centre noise is a mix of low- and high-frequency intake and exhaust fan noise at the structure level, diesel or turbine generators for the centres supplementing their own power or running backups (sometimes with cooling towers), and no real investment in sound damping.

Combine them with the tendency to build them in open, flat rural areas that have few or no trees or other buildings to baffle the sound, then run them 24/7, and it becomes a chronic issue for people who live nearby (even miles away, if the acoustics are just right).

That shouldn't have been as much of a problem in the US as it's become, but data centre projects get built near where people live because the infrastructure is already there. That naturally raised it as an issue in the UK, where there's less unpopulated space, before data centres of that scale were built: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-...

Data centers behave as acoustic weapons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

I would definitely agree that data center investments would need to be coupled with energy investments. If this could act as a catalyst for more (sustainable) energy production that would be a net win for all IMO.

> Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good.

Hear hear.

LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact.

I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).

In theory, let's say that a data center was proposed that:

1. got no tax breaks

2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation

3. did not pollute water supplies

4. made electricity prices go down somehow

5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry)

6. was extremely quiet

Would people still be mad about them?

I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."

It's also absurd how few jobs or income they provide to the community that is expected to host htem

It’s actually insane they call themselves conservatives when the whole platform has been instituting sweeping social changes and embracing new technologies.

This is why we have a federal government. Too bad it's been gutted by decades of neoliberalism and corporate lobbying

Exactly. There are many costs associated with data centers regardless of the type of data processing they do.

https://archive.ph/DqPNZ

The term "data center" was not even in the typical person's consciousness before the current AI era.

If you want people to support anything, show them how it benefits them. Do it as directly as possible - new jobs in their town, lower energy bills from a new plant, etc. People will generally follow the money.

What won't work is something like "it'll be better for the economy in the entire country, so put up with some disruption for a while." No one likes higher electricity bills while a power plant is being constructed, a new building going up too close to their homes that doesn't create jobs they can apply for, etc. It's a losing message to promise the payoff only years later or indirectly.

> The issues with data centers are manageable.

are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution?

governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation

The US has always had reactionaries, especially around topics construed as existential threats

> Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision?

Seems like an assumption on your part that being pro-data center reflects "vision" and "optimism."

We've heard a lot of optimism about Facebook, Google, etc. and now see all those companies having too much power over us and sucking worse eeach year. So we've evolved our thinking. Sorry it's tiring.

Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)

If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.

> Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?

Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich?

If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.