The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them.

Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics.

There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.

But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box.

I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.

>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate

The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)

The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...

Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.

Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).

But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.

AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere.

So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure.

>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.

It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise

For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press

> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space

I'm skeptical that they're actually surrounded by American prairie. What are the addresses of some of the data centers you're talking about?

Edit: I just see traditional American landscaping surrounding the CyrusOne data center in Aurora. I don't really see any native forbs or native grasses and it has a bunch of trees... where's the prairie?

> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.

The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.

> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.

Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.

The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.

It seems like the biggest issue, related to energy usage, is noise from turbines, right? Doesn’t Illinois have nukes? Does that alleviate the burden?

A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems

Where in Aurora? I’m at the CME DC daily, and I am not aware of any prairie green spaces that aren’t being actively developed. In fact the area between Bilter and Butterfield Rds are so active it’s changing my commute time to the DC — making my 10 minute ride often more than 30. So as someone who visits Aurora data centers daily I’m not seeing it.

The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.

> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.

This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers.

Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood.

> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.

You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know?

> But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls

You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7.

Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.

I'd rather have a DC as my neighbor than an office because what are offices full of? People like you who call the next guy's stuff an eyesore.

You might want to let the angry townspeople know because they're already passing symbolic measures and convincing the abuelas they're going to drain Lake Michigan to power these things:

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2026/07/27/hawthorne-race-cours...

Isn't Chicago filled with rail yards full of humming diesel locomotives? I couldn't think of a bigger eyesore. You can't plant trees in a rail yard.

The present anti-datacenter hysteria reeks of the "5G mind control cancer machines" of a few years ago.

The power supply issue is very real, though. UK has expensive electricity and high-megawattage data centers are obviously not going to help with that.

(The water issue doesn't pass the smell test for me because I expected data centers to be closed loop, but if it does apply? London is currently on a hosepipe ban!)

Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.

> deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects

Two counterpoints:

- the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?

- for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions

As modern datacenters go, 69,000 sq ft for a whole facility is REALLY small. Only some portion of that 69k is going to be actual conditioned space once you subtract all the ancillary services, things like security office, staging area, bathrooms, electrical breaker panel rooms, etc. It's almost like boutique/niche sized compared to the things that are going up in Texas, Indiana, a few other places. I know people building hyperscale size stuff that would almost call 69k sq ft hobby sized.

The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.

But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).

> the user instead of in big centralized facilities

Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.

> urban areas

The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.

It’s going to the high frontier. Orbital/lunar. It’s too important not to harden.

A traditional colo DC isn't running super power dense GPUs and doesn't use water cooling. These exist in whatever city you live in and no one knows where they are because there is no impact. They are completely different beasts.

They're not going to run email servers. They will run AI.

>Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space

Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point

Virtualization uses standard rack mount servers, crypto does not. The machinery they use are completely different.

The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws. I would personally vote against polticians who enacted those kinds of regulations; and if they passed anyway I would attempt to mine and use cryptocurrency in ways that circumvented the regulations banning me from doing so.

You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana

I like having my garbage picked up at the curb, but I wouldn't want to live downwind from a landfill.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

The Internet we are talking on didn't require the current unsustainable data center build-out. This is like saying that people complain about companies dumping toxic waste when they themselves poop. Scale matters.

Oh come on. 95% of new data centers are obviously for LLMs not communications

"You criticize society, yet you participate in it. How curious."

IMO noise pollution is the easiest one to solve: just put all the AC fans on the far side of the datacenter. If not enough, surround with noise absorbing panels. If not enough, just get a different fan design, more coolers, and run them at half speed. They can even afford Noctua :)

I bet nearby rail yard produces way more loud noises.

Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.

Hat tip for the additional source. I have no love for people in this fight looking for a "total win/defeat". It is a dumb way to approach large construction projects. Can you share some links to the Threads account?

We have those but data centers keep skirting them. Data center developers often classify their properties as "light industrial" or "warehouse" to bypass regulation. These lobbyists are also big enough to push state legislation that strips local towns and counties of land-use authority.

Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound

FTA:

> In late July, the Metro Council approved new zoning and related restrictions on data center development and implemented a moratorium on new permit approvals to run through Dec. 1.

I feel like that is besides the point. I think the fact that ended up this way is an illustration how hardened the public has become. There's no niceties, procedure. The public has been pushed well past that point. This is not a negotiation.

Eminent domain is almost always used to make corporations richer. In other parts of the country, eminent domain is being used to seize people's homes to build AI DCs.

No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.

> will over the individuals desire.

If you believe corporations are people.

Even billionaires really don't operate as individuals, they are a monster that we've let grow to have unchecked power across the entire federal government.

(note, I may be agreeing with what you're saying I just don't agree with the framing of the "individual") Most of the pushback belongs against the entities that are more powerful than even the federal government at times.)

> Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.

When a new DC is being proposed, how do you tell - for sure - whether it'll be quiet and discreet, vs. loud and noisy?

They want it to look more full because no one likes watching the Titans suck wind year after year, so the old stadium was laughably empty when the cameras panned over the stands.

I'm not joking. This is the reason I heard for them making it smaller.

Yes.

I get the background story but the response to a very specific thing seems sudden regardless.

> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology

While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.

Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.

But that's the right lever!

That gives the local voting population the ability to decide how much they're willing to put up with data centres. And a state that has excess water and electricity can have tax breaks and then that's where more data centres go.

I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)

Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.

Perhaps not from Neptune, but they don't exist in any of the 3 states I have lived in - so I was surprised.

Coming from the state of Virginia, I might say that they're a perfectly standard way to govern.

Pizzagate is a false conspiracy theory driven entirely by outrage culture perpetuating falsehoods and online hysteria. What's the disconnect in their example?

One that just happens to be very convenient for the machine-god peddling billionaires.

I don't think OP mentioned a machine god?

Really? You think the American way of life today is comparable to 1821?

You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?

The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].

The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].

Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_dynasty 2. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...

NIMBYs are the reason San Francisco doesn't have massive freeways splitting through the center of it. Sometimes NIMBYs get things right