Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...

>>“- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community

- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates

- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability

- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all

- Datacenters must be built using union labor”

Deal. This sounds like a great list. I would add, “no property tax breaks”.

Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?

No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.

This seems imminently fair to me.

> The rules he suggests are

Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.

Florida passed a state law that has standards are somewhat close to what you wrote, yet communities down here still voted to ban datacenter construction.

I worked for a lab that was building a new computer room and it spent about a year in the permitting process with the local town council before getting approved. Most of the focus in that process was on the geothermal cooling system.

Why must this be done at the federal(I presume what you mean when you say national) level? Seems to me, this should be up to the local community, if they want a datacenter or not.

But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.

> Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:

That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.

The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"

I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.

Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.

This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.

It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.

It was recently announced that Meta was building a DC about 75km from my city that is going to be using ~1.8GW of power.

What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.

That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.

That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.

They should also be fully covered in solar.

I like a lot of what El-Sayed has said about AI, but he's kind of disingenuous here. If you add enough rules like that, nothing's ever going to get built.

These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.

> isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them

Welcome to NIMBY

> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates

DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).

If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.

Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.

> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all

...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.

Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...

These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.

There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.

I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"

Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.

> They're generating their own electricity

Yeah, from natgas right? Or maybe diesel generators? Or are they building one of the practically nonexistent green energy data centers?

How are they generating this electricity without competing for resources generally?

There is also the increase in cost of borrowing for everyone. Going this fast is just insane.

You live in Snowville?

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.

Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.

The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.

It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...

This is why it's important for government to be built on principles and law, not merely on popular opinion.

From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land.

It uses less water than many other things, too, I'm sure.

But the farm made food. What does the data center create that humans need to survive?

It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.

And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.

The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers

The details are definitely fuzzy when you talk to people. At the same time, the sentiment is fairly solid. People do not like AI. They do like food. A farm may use more water, but people want the output of the farm. They don't want the output of the data centers.

That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.

The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.

Why not just build the data center right on Oleary's land, right next to his mansion? He'll create jobs there too.

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

So the farm is no longer there? As in it is using zero water right now?

> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Serious doubt. They will use whichever is cheaper, and that's going to be the grid.

It doesn't matter what their reasons are. It's their community

The natural gas they are burning is being bought from the market and that will more than likely lead to increased natural gas costs.

> "Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake

A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise

Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"

"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"

How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.

In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.

I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.

What does the farm grow? Is it less valuable than what the data center will produce? Because you can't eat data. Utah is full of empty spaces that aren't being put to use (except maybe to set land speed records). Why not use those?

As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.

Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?

That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Utah

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.

This is the crux of the whole thing is it not? People want money into their communities and even more into their pockets:

https://nationalsecurity.virginia.edu/research/what-american...

But not everything turns out fine:

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/richland-p...

Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.

> It's going to use less water than the farm

A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.

> "Noise"

Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.

> "Wildlife refuge"

I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.

These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.

>"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.

>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.

>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.

Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.

I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.

The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.

No idea why people keep comparing with farm. We can live without data center, but we can't live without food.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.

Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?

I think that part of the problem might be that people don't trust corporations. Sure, they say all that, and that may even be the current plan, but is that how things will actually end up? Will there be consequences "unintended" consequences like polution? Will this be used as a stepping stone to something that is harmful?

Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.

It's a question of what the gain is. The perceived gain is currently zero. So even any tiny risk of any drawback gets a "no" vote.

My concern is that so much of what is going on with data centers in general ( and from what I have read, this one also ) is everything that is kept private from the communities. People need to stop acting like the people are not part of the government and don't have a say. We may elect representation, but we are still in charge.

People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.

It’s might create a massive localized heat problem https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

few points: 1. the water usage claim is reported only by developer. However, the developer omitted the fact that more water is also need to cool down the gas power plant. The project reported only water used by the DC directly. 2. so far nothing firm is committed regarding the DC will produce power on site. I would be careful with what developer claims vs. the reality. 3. isn't the problematic refuge around Locomotive Springs? 4. sure, if you live 1hour away from the DC you won't have issue with noise. But what about the communities closer to the DC? 5. the DC is planning to use as much power as the whole Utah, what will happen with the waste heat energy?

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?

The water you cite is groundwater. It does not return in the same lifetime it is consumed at that rate. Gaining in this context simply means losing less than before. Weasel words are exactly why voters reject building AI.

This is classic Haidt's Righteous Mind stuff -- people vibe out a moral judgement, then generate rational explanations post-hoc. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out what the vibed judgement is.

I think that a lot of people are more sophisticated than you think, and see data center buildouts as WeWork-style unsustainable growth spurred by speculative fervour rather than business fundamentals.

I think a lot of this can be chalked up to poor regulation. People think it will cause bad effects because the government bodies and processes are not trusted to prevent that.

The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.

Did you research the reasons in favor building it with the same rigor? What was the outcome?

This is my read of it, I don't really have any special data about the average voter, so feel free to disregard my opinions.

I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.

I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"

At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.

That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.

People are really underestimating how much influence tiktok has over the gen pop.

Has anyone said they don't like Kevin Oleary? That's usually good enough.

You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

How much?

You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.

Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".

Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?

Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers: * Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc). * Massive economic destabilization and disruption * Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility * Wars and international conflict * Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry * Takeover by governments, use by threat actors * A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.

Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.

WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."

And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.

Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.

It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.

Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.

Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.

I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.

In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.

I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.

In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.

My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)

ps. Have never used tiktok

> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception

I think it's a proxy for something else. Data centers are associated with AI and the AI billionaires were seen with Trump and Musk has his own baggage. Data centers are apparently being built but unless you go look them up online, I doubt most people know where they are even (and I don't know if those maps are accurate). What will happen is the AI billionaires and tech will politically realign and then it suddenly won't be an issue anymore.

Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls

Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.

And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.

"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.

It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.

Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.

But then what's the implication here? Why would there be large scale propaganda or otherwise effort against large companies who have and make a lot of money? In whose interest is it to get people to dislike the data centers (other than, perhaps debatably, the people themselves)? If its all truly just people being duped, to what end does the naïvete serve?

I'd pretty much oppose anything Kevin O'leary was involved in, too.

>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?

Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.

I think you’re too focused on the actual facts. My take: people hate them because they are a physical manifestation of the tech bro billionaires.

A farm produces food that people can eat. A data center runs AI that takes people's jobs and produces... vibe coded websites that look like trash.

You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for

> I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here.

i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm

data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.

Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.

People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.

The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.

If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.

> The county is gaining water from this

All farming should be stopped immediately and converted to data centres, then we’ll have unlimited water!

It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.

I don't trust the datacenter side of the table at all. I don't trust their claims. I don't trust their numbers. We have myriad examples of their lies. Do we have any examples of them being good corporate citizens that offset this?

I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.

There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?

It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.

If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation

There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities

> Tech is now viewed in the same lens as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"

That's right, but consider what people would be saying about oil companies on Driller News. Thousands of users here have financial or ideological vested interests in the success of the current crop of tech companies. They can recognize the individual faults of the industry where it doesn't affect their primary interest - such as disliking social media, addictive design and so on - but when you start talking about THE tech golden goose, the criticism dies down.

Who cares what Luddites think?

Exactly. The most baffling thing about the backlash is how shocked the tech boosters are at it. I know tech can be a bubble, but it's stark to see just how out of touch people inside can be.

Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better. They are deeply skeptical that future gains will be freely shared with them rather than horded by a few tech oligarchs. Based on pretty much all of modern history, they're right to be skeptical.

This is apparently incomprehensible to many AI proponents, but many people would genuinely rather live next to a farm than a data center. They don't care that you can vibe code a hobby project or a jira ticket 10x faster than before. They do want cheaper utilities and a secure economic position, and they are well aware that AI is providing the opposite for them.

The current framing of US politics is basically "vote for us because the other party is an existential threat" and data center proponents have adopted a similarly retarded position "we have to build data centers or China wins."

For this framing to work, you need a base of reliable supporters already all-in on your cause regardless of how you actually perform, and the data center proponents have done virtually everything imaginable the last four years to drive people away. Why AI investors are shocked (shocked) is really beyond explicable reason; American on both teams have never responded well to this kind of brain-dead gambit.

For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout. If the US were a thinking nation, it would be trivial to ram through solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines. However, we all saw what happened when Massachusetts tried to build power lines to buy power from Hydro-Quebec, for example. It’s entirely a regulatory self own that AI capex is being spent on gas turbines instead of wind turbines.

How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered? The only on-the-shelf low carbon tech with the reliability and deployability we need is nuclear. Any other discussion is just pointless.

Supply constraints

"No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”

I think you mean resent?

And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.

This is exactly what happened in Loudon County. Didn’t matter they’re still mad.

What ownership model are you referring to that is tech-specific and why is it in quotes?

I think this is missing the issue. It's not the cranes and walls that bother people, it's the tech companies. They've shown themselves repeatedly to be bad faith and exploitative actors. Now they're asking to move in. It's easy to understand why people are saying no.

And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but that should be highly counter-intuitive. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor; society entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive work as well as increase unemployment is quite likely. My prediction is based on 'what comes next' but if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month, this is all going to be, again understandably, seen as pie in the sky.

>My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?

I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.

I'm opposed to NIMBYism 99% of the time, but these data centers aren't being opposed for no reason. There's stories coming out all over the country of negative impacts on communities and backroom deals with local officials who sign NDAs during negotiations. There's a goldrush on in the US to build these out and when that happens companies run roughshod over communities.

> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?

The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.

How is the profitability of the big AI companies looking? How is their ability to service their debt shaping up?

> somewhere else (tm)

Also known as China, future world superpower. They have enough political continuity to formulate a strategy at national scale and execute on it.

It's crazy how they just keep winning while the US and democracies the world over keep shooting themselves in the foot.

> while they get the gains

The gains continue to flow into the US... For now. I wonder how long that'll last.

> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?

Maybe it looks like a reduction in monopolies, increased competition, lowering of prices as automation pays dividends, and a general de-consolidation of power.

It doesn't look like 4-companies owning the whole stock market and incumbents using AI to cut every worker they can with no longterm plan, using AI to deny insurance claims, and rig the deck in the most unconscionable uncompetitive ways they can.

There are outcomes much worse than "flat" if we aren't careful, and even the AI CEOs say as much.

> But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.

There is absolutely no need for cranes to show up in or near existing neighborhoods to build data centers. The US is not out of remote land that would be well suited for this purpose, but building in those places requires spending more money to build supporting infrastructure, so businesses prefer to avoid that cost.

If the growth is truly beneficial, it should be able to pay for itself, and I think that is what people want to see enforced.

Data centers take resources, land, and ways of life from rural communities to give economic growth opportunities to people in cities without paying those rural communities.

Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone, and protecting the environment and ecosystems for long-term sustainability. I’m not even remotely convinced we need ‘number go up’ to make this happen - if anything, the hyper focus on “economic growth” seems to run counter to equity and sustainability.

I think that as an industry, we'll have to make the case persuasively that the datacenters won't hurt quality of life for nearby residents, that they'll have a positive influence on the local economy, and that even more broadly that the benefit from AI is shared and not captured by small group of the ultra wealthy.

That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.

Why should we believe that we will meaningfully benefit from that economic growth? We aren't benefiting much now. And if we won't benefit then why should we care about it?

Does economic growth look like companies firing hundreds or thousands of employees in batches because they are replacing them with AI? Because that's what people are seeing in headlines. That and mass surveillance.

Why are you upset that citizens have a right in how their communities are developed? Do you not understand that a majority of people do not care about helping capitalists get slightly richer and would rather have a life of quiet dignity?

Good. That's how America's free market is supposed to work.

Why do you say that? TARP was extremely unpopular yet still happened.

Never underestimate the willingness of politicians to vote for pork.

> If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.

That's how things should work. Bailouts are socialism for corporations.

Democrats have participated in previous bailouts, I don't see why they wouldn't participate in this one. Especially given that the "it" in your "let it burn" scenario isn't AI companies, it's the economy.

thats called free market capitalism...

Not at all. The reasonable democrats will be forced to clean this mess (and Iran) while spending their newly found political capital and pissing off their base.

AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.

And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.

Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.

> Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities.

When the data center is built and the dump trucks leave, what is the ongoing benefit for that community?

What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development with similar land and resource use? It seems to me that datacenters have low ongoing employment requirements compared to those resources used, and that many of the benefits of running the datacenter aren't gained by the local community but rather by businesses located far away.

US is happy to ship toxic manufacturing, and even plain old garbage, offshore. They wouldn't bat an eye at DCs moving.

I wonder which enterprising Caribbean country will figure out how to make data-sovereignty laws attractive such that no one cares about data moving outside of the US.

Yes. And are not exempted from existing pollution regulations.

The data centers will pay market rates. The thing is the market rates will be higher- and that affects regular people.

A household can’t compete with a data center on electricity/ water prices. So households will have to pay more.

Lol. You don’t think these data centers affect market rates?

How do the jobs and local economic benefit compare between a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, and a datacenter?

Are companies proposing steel mills and semiconductor fabs directly adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods?

Will those developments pay for the required infrastructure expansions, or get special deals to waive those costs in return for building in that community?

Mostly yes. Everyone would also prefer that steel mills semiconductor fabs get built somewhere else, where they personally don't have to deal with any of the externalities.

Those will likely create lots of jobs. Local industry is good.

I don't think data centers are directly the issue either, but a proxy for feelings about the LLM era in general.

FUD spread from competing nation states is where it all originated from. Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began. If you live in a medium to large city goto google maps and search for "datacenter" in your town, i bet you live within 5 miles of one that you've never even noticed before.

There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

edit: let me add that the price of natural gas in TX is effectively zero.. or may even be negative. There's plenty of energy available. Now, availability of turbines to convert those chemical bonds to eletricity is another matter but the gas is there.

Unfortunately people have no difficulties having completely contradictory and absurd views. Understanding of the concept of a supply chain or dependency web is also quite weak.

All it takes is for one state to grant AI narrowly-scoped medical licensing to treat various things human doctors are allowed to treat telephonically.

They won't, because we'll still have no money to pay for healthcare as a result of AI taking our jobs. To the contrary, right now the rational choice is to not allow these AI farms to be installed so that many of us (this is not only about the US) still have access to a decent lifestyle (including decent health, that is).

What can be done about the noise? I keep thinking about this meeting in Carroll County, KY about 1 week ago where residents confronted county officials by playing recordings of the data center noise ongoing onside their homes. [0][1]

> “You guys have made your point, okay,” Nab tells the local residents.

> “But we have to live with this now!” they urgently respond.

> “Oh, ya have to live with it?” Nab shoots back, smirking as he speaks.

> “Yes we do!” the locals reply, as other townies chime in. At one point, a security guard jumps in and warns everyone to act like “adults.”

The near open mocking of residents as they grapple with persistent noise is what bends me the wrong way.

[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/resident-screec...

[1] https://www.wkyt.com/2026/10/29/carroll-county-residents-pla...

Ofcourse they can be solved. But companies like to cut corners because of money. They don't want safe or clean they want cheap.

Huh? What is the solution for higher electrical bills? Build more power plants? Who will pay to build these power plants? The AI companies?

Laws are public, you are welcome to go read them. All of the ones I've read define it based on [x] megawatt of compute or similar. None of them are banning a rack of servers in a closet.

I would be surprised if a rack of servers in an office closet could realistically draw 25 megawatts of energy, which is generally the cutoff that these local ordinances use to define a "data center". Keeping in mind that the cost of commercial electricity alone for powering even a 1 megawatt data center continuously for 1 month would have to be at least 100,000 dollars, right?

In Ohio: 25 megawatts. $2 million/month in electricity, call it $750m of hardware, plus the building.

This is not going to affect small businesses.

I haven't seen a broad analysis, but every specific one I've looked into accounted for your concern and defined some sort of minimum size or power draw.

They never do that in the "first round". Usually you gotta wait for a compliance industry to spring up and then they inevitably lobby for the definition of people who need to pay the compliance industry to get watered down. It's just the natural incentive creep of the system.

> Politician promised "no data centers". District was unsuitable for data centers anyway.

On the bright side, here's a politician who can keep their promise.

Yep same as GOP using trans panic, women in men's sports, Haitians eating cats and dogs, gender reassignment surgery in schools. These things aren't real issues but it works.

If datacenters in space becomes a thing, we will then learn that the rockets that launch them release neurotoxins into the air, and call for an immediate moratorium on rocket launches.

Anyone with the care to pay attention to what is going on realizes that the pushback on DCs has nothing to do with DCs, and everything to do with fear about AI.

Data centers in China, more likely

The difference is that these AI data centers use significantly more power on a per-rack basis (and thus requiring much bigger backup generators) and generate much more heat (requiring much more cooling) than the data centers of old.

Hopefully!

We have so much vacant industrial land in the rust belt (so-called "brownfields"), with good access and utility infrastructure, why not build the data centers there? Why do they need to go on farmland in the countryside?

I lived near mega diaries and oil fields growing up. Depending on the wind you either smelled manure or sulfur. People used to say "smells like money" because ag and oil were the source of jobs in the area.

We had a cake/chocolate factory near my town growing up, on some windy days it smelled really nice.

I also believe they’re inevitable. Capital will find places without opposition and build them. There are thousands of jurisdictions in the US and capital usually wins.

I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.

Pretty much. Mushroom farms smell like shit when the wind turns. Even just normal farms smell like manure at various times of the year. Amazon fulfillment centres are hideous and create a lot of traffic in the surrounding area. There's a reason building industry near residential in the SimCity series causes residential property values to drop.

Yes, this is the trillion dollar question

Yeah, no shit. People don't like the job stealing machine.

i'm not cheering or crying because of the results but curious about what happens next, I guess ready or not, into the future we go! Do me a favor and right down the 10 things promised to you by the people you voted for and put it an envelope to open 2 years from now at the next election. I think that's a worthwhile exercise and asked my kids (17 and 14) to do the same since they were both super tuned in to the election and have their own opinions.

And you don’t feel dirty about this victory because your glee is based on TikToks making people believe that data centres turn water dirty?

Forgive my ignorance, but how would the current data center proposals "economically benefit their children"? It seems like a local land concession that would benefit a national economy, but hardly do anything long-term for the locality where the data center is built (maybe ~100 jobs and some property taxes).

Data centres have no real reason to be built in anyone's backyard. To prove it I'll just say that some of the guys that want to put it in your backyard, also ponder putting it in space.

The high-level solution, though, is to stop concentrating housing and all the supporting infrastructure. NIMBY is a positive force in that regard.

The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.

BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.

Unless you're really ideology driven there's very few things that can be built around your neighbourhood (especially in a suburb) that will make it more valuable or pleasant to live. NIMBY is just not wanting to lose things.

They did not. They rejected the billionaire tax in California. A bunch of temporarily embarrassed billionaires in California protected the rich

This fuels the bro billionaires.

So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it.

The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that.

We live in a system wherein our survival is gate kept by oligopolistic technology, energy, and health insurance corporations.

One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.

Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.

I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit?

The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!

One of the nice things about living in a rich country is the ability to externalise certain costs.

"Yet you participate in society, curious! I'm very intelligent."

Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and petulance.

Common pattern:

"I'm campaigning against A."

"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."

"I don't care!"

The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.