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.

    whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why would you believe anything posted on X? The platform deliberately promotes misinformation, and has for years.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

You are a voice a reason.

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?