I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777

In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.

Also Sam, Dario et al have constantly (like literally, every single week at least) been telling us that AI is going to make all of us unemployable and have to live on welfare.

Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?

The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology

Exactly

Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.

I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.

Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal. People are sick of tech companies bribing their way out of any accountability.

> When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike

Why is that?

Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live.

I've been to a data center before due to work and my impression of the place was really good. It's kinda invisible from the outside, everything is extremely clean. There's no noise on the outside and the excess heat is used to get people cheap warm water or something like that.

I'm quite confused why people suddenly hate on them. Feels like I'm missing a whole lot of context.

And if they can't give capacity, they should maybe be required to give a kind of "call option" or hedge locals energy prices linked to regular inflation.

Companies are content to charge more in the short term to pay for the upgrades on the backs of the current subscribers as opposed to just charging the people for whom the extra load is desired.

Then these big buyers go ahead and pay 50% of what everyone else is paying.

That's not the main issue at all. I'm baffled where you got that idea.

Also, I live in Northern Virginia where we have tons of data centers, and energy prices have not spiked.

Or the fact everyone's utility bills are going up.

> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production

I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.

I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.

And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.

Just a man on the street here—I sense it's more a backlash against tech-bros in general. People are seeing the world getting worse from tech and they're taking their pitchforks to the data centers and Flock cameras.

(Of course I might simply be projecting.)

That includes nuclear power, correct?

So not the massive Chinese bot farm (200K +) launching anti-datacenter propaganda campaigns? It's just the green energy concern? ("Spiking local prices" was one of the propaganda talking points.)

These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.

There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.

No a big part is that the buildings are ugly and transform the character of a place that folks grew up in. Maybe focus should be put on beautifying these buildings in some way

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It won’t necessarily impact local energy prices significantly. Some facilities build gas turbine generators, but these cause the noise that neighbors complain about. Gas isn’t as bad about pollution (except CO2) but you don’t want to live next door to a plant either.

Also, adding a few data centers to a large grid shouldn’t bump up the energy prices, it’s only when you add many across the area. This is difficult to pin down because if one side of a region builds many data centers without their own power generation, the whole region could see eventual price increases. Fortunately most (all?) states regulate utility price increases, but still you don’t want to max out the price bump year after year.

It’s hard to discuss because different facilities have different configurations, and the local impact depends on that plus local characteristics.

Given the externalities of large facilities like this, impacted neighbors should definitely get a vote. Maybe we need a standard to define the impact radius based on the facility characteristics. This would add transparency and make it easier for people to decide without FUD and distortion. Unfortunately I don’t have much confidence in anyone coming up with such a standard without altering it to benefit their side, now that it’s become a political football.

There's also the water usage, which time and time again they lie blatantly about, and they choose to want to often build these things in heavily populated drought-stressed areas for some foolish reason. And then you got clowns like Musk wantin' to build 'em entirely powered by dirty generators instead of any form of clean energy (which, I mean, if you're buildin' in drought-stressed sunny areas, why not some variant of solar, right?).

S'okay. Facts and reality don't matter. Everything's peachy-keen, folks. Just wander on by and downvote reality and it'll magically go away... :sigh:

why? data center opposition is just morons who don't know what they're talking about 99% of the time

They already do, indirectly. The local government gets property taxes from these data centers. But maybe it would be more real for people if you just wrote them a check I guess.

You can just do this for everything everywhere with near-zero enforcement complexity by instituting a high Land Value Tax

It's just sad that Americans only unite when it's something in their own backyard. Democracy in the US is collapsing, and people are standing idly by. Maybe they'll leave an angry comment under a TikTok video, but that's about all the patriotism people seem to muster.

There are many surveys which make it clear, this is not the reason. They are straightforwardly (right or wrong) protesting the physical installations, their water and electricity use, and other hard-to-quantify vibes like radiation and noise (similar to 5g protests).

They know very little about the job market impact of AI, and are mostly retired so they don't care anyway.

I am quite sure you are being facetious, but XRot has made me doubt everything.

> Turns out putting them in space is the answer!

Can we put them on Mars, and maybe send Elon to tend them?

I think this is why I'm sort of excited about this, even if some of it's "misguided" according to some.

I haven't seen people really care and mobilize since maybe BLM?

This is fair and I think it’s what is really happening here.

The only lever the government seems to have is tax breaks, and the only lever the people seem to have is NIMBYism. What a joke.

I remember the fracking roll out here. The companies involved directly handed checks to local residents, promised to train locals for new jobs, paid to fund schools, and so on.

These companies have a lot of money behind them - if they're not willing to put in the effort to convince local residents that the data center will be good for them, I feel like that's on them. They could easily do some handouts and fix this. Offer to pay extra taxes to the state or whatever, fund a new power plant, pay everyone who lives nearby the DC some thousands of dollars, whatever.

The older I get the more and more convinced I become that the media is the actual real enemy of the country. Their lifeblood is creating controversy and drama about everything so they can show ads. So insane that so few call them out (probably because most people are already "captured" by them).

> As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims.

But have they disproportionately amplified them? I follow some energy experts, and the consensus for AI-focused mega-datacenters seems to be "no". Some interesting reports:

• Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI's Environmental and Human Effects - https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107172

• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission): "…approximately half of this [$5.1 billion] cost will be borne by customers…" - https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/commissioner-clements-...

• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas: Processing Power: The Effect of Data Centers on Wholesale Electricity Markets - https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/...

we can probably generalize and say that anything that's a culture war issue has become disconnected with useful actionable reality.