99% is an interesting figure because that's roughly how much my energy bill has increased despite no significant change in my usage due to data center demand on the grid
All of those can be addressed by proper regulation. Banning them outright is the equivalent of banning all immigration just because there's some particular subgroup that people hate.
Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.
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
They've fired up the same irrational hordes that brought us flat earthing, anti-vax, and 5G Covid. It's just another parade of extreme ignorance. And yes, the SF crowd is comically oblivious to what they're dealing with, ivory tower style.
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
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.
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years (26% annual growth rate)
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years (73% annual growth rate)
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The 2015 - 2024 growth curve would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth (which is obviously accelerating), especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
You misunderstood I think. They aren't arguing water is a bigger problem than energy. They are arguing that negative perception is mostly focused around water use.
They do use water, and the numbers look very large which makes for big scary headlines. However people who actually know how water is used in a city are used to numbers much larger than that.
Yeah, it’s one thing when SV runs the Uber script (ignoring the law to build big enough to buy politicians) to hurt cab drivers. It’s very different when it’s your neighborhood.
Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology so who is dropping the ball?
The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:
1. Replacing forests and fields with concrete buildings prevents rainwater from filtering into the soil, which stops local aquifers from recharging.
2. During storms the rain runs off impervious surfaces and can cause downstream flooding.
3. Heavy land grading washes loose sediment into nearby waterways, destroying aquatic habitats and turning private drinking wells muddy. (That especially gets local homeowners angry and gets lots of video views).
And then you have the ongoing operation of open cooling systems:
4. Evaporative cooling systems discharge concentrated mineral brine that spikes the salinity of freshwater ecosystems.
5. Cooling water is treated with toxic biocides and anti-scalants that can contaminate local water basins. It can also contain leached copper, zinc, and PFAS.
6. Discharging warm wastewater depletes oxygen in streams and alters the overall ecology.
Of course all of these issues could be mitigated to a reasonable degree with proper care and effort:
>this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly
Do you want to bet your whole town on things being done properly right now?
Yeah, all these stupid little municipalities have to do is shit they've literally never had to do before while getting sued out of their socks by literal trillion dollar companies.
That's all it takes for them to do their part in generating gargantuan amounts of value for people who live 1,000 miles away and their uberwealthy hardly-human CEOs and investors.
People should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
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.
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.
Northern Virginia has tons of data centers because it had massive amounts of excess energy capacity.
That is now being consumed and now Loudon County will also start engaging in electricity price wars with data centers. New regulations to segregate markets is supposed to kick in on Jan 1 2027, in fact.
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.
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.
Some older nuclear power plants are been commissioned back into production:
Three Mile Island
"2027 – Nuclear Regulatory Commission to decide whether to issue operating license to Constellation Energy, with the decision expected in May. If granted, Constellation expects to bring the reactor back online later in the year."
You don't need to build them. You can just not retire, or unretire one.
Though we really should get better at building nuclear power plants. I'm think more of small ones to power ships though, not land based ones. Ships are one of the few places where oil/coal are used that there are not realistic renewable alternatives.
So then does the data center compensate local residents for their higher power bills today? Until the new capacity comes online?
> Your requirements is like demanding nobody can buy a house unless they have pay they entire amount upfront.
No it's like demanding your new neighbors aren't forced to lend you money for your purchase - which is entirely reasonable. If you need money, get it from the bank.
The top-level comment explains it already:
"When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution."
For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years. An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
> For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years.
That's still better than 11-12 years. How long does a solar farm take?
If residents' opposition is rooted in higher power prices, data centers could just pay extra instead until the new capacity comes online. Seems like a cheap way to pay off opposition.
> An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
Given this article is about Pennsylvania, it'll probably take millions of years.
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
I don’t see how they are any uglier than any other industrial facility. That’s really what these are and it’s how they should be viewed. Typically most people don’t want to live next door to a factory, but there are some places where it’s appropriate to build them, often remote land or former industrial sites (brownfields) where you don’t want housing due to previous contamination.
Even if invisible they would not be a popular neighbour because they are a very overt reminder to the poor people around them how uneven the wealth and political power distribution is between them and the tech exec owners?
They should be popular - they pay property taxes to the local schools without taking much from the community at all. (note that I'm coming out against the all too common tax breaks that they get to build in your city)
People in my area are complaining about data centers being built in rural fields and on former aluminum plant and power plant sites. The debate has become pretty detached from reality. What remains rooted in reality mostly comes down to electric bills / power consumption and the fact that, as everyone is saying, it's the only way for people to push back against big tech billionaires.
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:
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.
Residents of the state should get money for needing to live next to data centers and the use of their land/natural resources/etc, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund.
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.
The local government gets property taxes from these data centers.
Not if they get a sweetheart tax deal. Why do you think folks are so pissy? It’s like a sports stadium next to your house in that the principals get tax breaks, eminent domain, and other considerations, but it makes noise every day(not just weekends) and you don’t get to go to the game.
The sweetheart deals are usually from the state, sometimes the county. Town budgets tend to be so small that ~$20m/yr will have the council falling over themselves to approve it.
The problem, from the cases I have looked at, seems to be that towns want to do dumb shit with this money rather than just cut residents a tax break.
The sweetheart deals I've seen has been the state approving things that mostly affect the locals. A large part of property tax goes to local governments who were given no input in the deal.
Or the towns are not rich enough to fight in a lawsuit after the town council initially says no, which is how my local datacenter was approved against the will of the people
Even with a state sweetheart tax deal, the most populated county in my state gets half of its property tax income from a datacenter. Projection for one in my county looks like it would hit 70%.
tbh I'm more worried about the resource curse from the sudden change in budget
You tell everyone AI is going to put them out of a job and then you’re surprised when working class communities say “no, please leave” when folks want to build a data center in their back yard.
There are times when Silicon Valley looks out of touch and there are times when Silicon Valley just looks like idiots with hubris. This is more the later.
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.
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.
Anyone who has never lived next to a data center is commentating on the side lines without experience about what it’s actually like.
Lots of these commentaries miss the following:
- noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging
- rises costs of power and water
- more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns
The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.
And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.
The intense anti-DC sentiment shouldn't be surprising - NIMBYism is the only viable mechanism available to people in the US. It doesn't matter if you're worried about Glonzo or have real concerns, they must be expressed in NIMBY terms in order to be heard.
For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.
There's lots of AI capex that is low risk. If it ends up being under utilized companies like Amazon and Google will adjust their capex plans. When they say things like under spending is riskier than overspending, for them, that's plausible.
But the sketchiest part of the bubble is when you directly bolt a no name data center company to Nvidia's cash pile, and you start turning cash into ever-lengthening receivables collection time, that's why people are skeptical of data centers: even if they can't tell a Google data center from a pivoting crypto bros data center, they smell the bullshit.
People also know they are being lied to, Oracle claims their New Mexico data center will run on Bloom fuel cells. I doubt Bloom is ready to scale to data center size without proof of concept in different applications at large if not directly comparable scale.
People don't want the billionaires coming into your town and having their way with it, the one you live in and are supposed to get a say in how things are done. This is not difficult to understand.
1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];
2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and
3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].
All of this is relevant here.
The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.
So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.
So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.
This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.
As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc.
I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.
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:
Why don't they just buy extra land surrounding the data center to reduce noise pollution concerns?
Regardless hopefully this restarts nuclear power generation
Many things divide us here: Wawa or Sheetz; cheesesteaks or pierogi; Eagles or Steelers; but I very glad we could come together on this.
why? data center opposition is just morons who don't know what they're talking about 99% of the time
>99% of the time
99% is an interesting figure because that's roughly how much my energy bill has increased despite no significant change in my usage due to data center demand on the grid
Concerns about noise pollution and increased electricity costs are just morons?
What about concerns about air pollution from unregulated diesel generators? Or using large amounts of water in drought prone areas?
All of those can be addressed by proper regulation. Banning them outright is the equivalent of banning all immigration just because there's some particular subgroup that people hate.
I wouldn’t be so coarse, but mostly yes. Data centres are hardly new, and the subset of legitimate criticisms problems are hardly unique.
so what you're saying is that the problems people have with new data centers are real and well-documented?
Care to expand?
Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.
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
They've fired up the same irrational hordes that brought us flat earthing, anti-vax, and 5G Covid. It's just another parade of extreme ignorance. And yes, the SF crowd is comically oblivious to what they're dealing with, ivory tower style.
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
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.
2015 to 2024...?
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years (26% annual growth rate)
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years (73% annual growth rate)
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The 2015 - 2024 growth curve would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth (which is obviously accelerating), especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
You misunderstood I think. They aren't arguing water is a bigger problem than energy. They are arguing that negative perception is mostly focused around water use.
They suggested (and linked to paper arguing) that data centers are not causing energy prices to go up.
I am saying the paper's scope of analysis (up to 2024) renders it pretty much irrelevant.
And that's very suspicious given that they published the paper in 2026. Was it somehow impossible to find energy prices for 25+26?
What exactly are you getting at? Datacenters do use potable water from municipal sources for evaporative cooling. Are you claiming that's not true?
Here's a recent source: https://pacinst.org/publication/how-much-water-do-data-cente...
They do use water, and the numbers look very large which makes for big scary headlines. However people who actually know how water is used in a city are used to numbers much larger than that.
golf courses use much more. But you don’t see massive resistance against new golf courses being planned.
Farms use an order of magnitude more than either. You don’t see any demands whatsoever on agriculture to reduce water usage.
Yeah, it’s one thing when SV runs the Uber script (ignoring the law to build big enough to buy politicians) to hurt cab drivers. It’s very different when it’s your neighborhood.
Some do, some use closed-loop systems that are essentially 'charge once'. higher energy use, but less water
Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though? Sounds like a municipality problem, a water consumer shouldn't be feeding back into the system, or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices? Maybe when they first pipe in or something is being left open during construction, this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly, water supply systems are not a new technology so who is dropping the ball?
The construction itself absolutely alters local watersheds:
1. Replacing forests and fields with concrete buildings prevents rainwater from filtering into the soil, which stops local aquifers from recharging.
2. During storms the rain runs off impervious surfaces and can cause downstream flooding.
3. Heavy land grading washes loose sediment into nearby waterways, destroying aquatic habitats and turning private drinking wells muddy. (That especially gets local homeowners angry and gets lots of video views).
And then you have the ongoing operation of open cooling systems:
4. Evaporative cooling systems discharge concentrated mineral brine that spikes the salinity of freshwater ecosystems.
5. Cooling water is treated with toxic biocides and anti-scalants that can contaminate local water basins. It can also contain leached copper, zinc, and PFAS.
6. Discharging warm wastewater depletes oxygen in streams and alters the overall ecology.
Of course all of these issues could be mitigated to a reasonable degree with proper care and effort:
>this seems like it shouldn't happen if things are being done properly
Do you want to bet your whole town on things being done properly right now?
Yeah, all these stupid little municipalities have to do is shit they've literally never had to do before while getting sued out of their socks by literal trillion dollar companies.
That's all it takes for them to do their part in generating gargantuan amounts of value for people who live 1,000 miles away and their uberwealthy hardly-human CEOs and investors.
> Why and how would they contaminate the water supply though?
One recent-ish example: ^[1]
> ... or is it being caused by poorly executed construction practices?
I believe their contractor was responsible for this one IIRC?
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2026/07/09/meta...
People should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
There it is.
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.
> Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal.
Yeah, Elon's a big fan of this tactic.
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.
Or the fact everyone's utility bills are going up.
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.
Northern Virginia has tons of data centers because it had massive amounts of excess energy capacity.
That is now being consumed and now Loudon County will also start engaging in electricity price wars with data centers. New regulations to segregate markets is supposed to kick in on Jan 1 2027, in fact.
Wow, you have insanely, enviably cheap power.
But also, it seems to have increased in price quite a bit lately.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS35A72610
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.)
> I sense it's more a backlash against tech-bros in general.
I can almost guarantee there's a good bit of that also involved in addition to all the other concerns and issues folks also rightly have.
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.
Ah, the good old "outside agitators" canard.
> These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity
And now you've got all the noise and pollution from that to deal with.
That includes nuclear power, correct?
Can they build it safely as fast as the data center it's meant to power? Full steam ahead then.
Some older nuclear power plants are been commissioned back into production:
Three Mile Island
"2027 – Nuclear Regulatory Commission to decide whether to issue operating license to Constellation Energy, with the decision expected in May. If granted, Constellation expects to bring the reactor back online later in the year."
https://www.witf.org/2026/07/28/three-mile-island-reactor-re...
Michigan’s Palisades nuclear power plant
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/americas-first-...
Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nextera-energy-partn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Arnold_Energy_Center#Res...
If electricity bills are steady or falling they should have no trouble convincing voters. Nothing to worry about.
You don't need to build them. You can just not retire, or unretire one.
Though we really should get better at building nuclear power plants. I'm think more of small ones to power ships though, not land based ones. Ships are one of the few places where oil/coal are used that there are not realistic renewable alternatives.
It can be a little later. Your requirements is like demanding nobody can buy a house unless they have pay they entire amount upfront.
People do not believe big companies when they say "I'll deal with the externalities a little later."
So then does the data center compensate local residents for their higher power bills today? Until the new capacity comes online?
> Your requirements is like demanding nobody can buy a house unless they have pay they entire amount upfront.
No it's like demanding your new neighbors aren't forced to lend you money for your purchase - which is entirely reasonable. If you need money, get it from the bank.
The top-level comment explains it already:
"When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution."
It typically takes 11-12 years for a nuclear plant to get built including planning and construction [1].
Is the idea that we'd build the data centers now, and finish the nuclear plants to power them 11-12 years from now?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-timeline-of-a-nu...
For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years. An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
https://jmhpower.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-wind-t...
> For wind turbine project from design and planning to operational use-takes approximately 4-7 years.
That's still better than 11-12 years. How long does a solar farm take?
If residents' opposition is rooted in higher power prices, data centers could just pay extra instead until the new capacity comes online. Seems like a cheap way to pay off opposition.
> An offshore wind turbine project requires about 7-10 years.
Given this article is about Pennsylvania, it'll probably take millions of years.
> How long does a solar farm take?
24–48 months, but for a data center that has to run 24/7 you need to also build a gas power plant.
https://www.pvfarm.io/blog/utility-scale-solar-project-devel...
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-ce...
Or use batteries.
Also residential and industrial use will be lower at night. So the existing grid supply may also be enough.
Nuclear power takes 10-20 years to build from scratch.
Median build time for 1 GW nuclear power plant in Japan was 1721 days (4.7 years), first concrete to grid connection.
https://x.com/GrantChalmers/status/1422472474487263233
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
I don’t see how they are any uglier than any other industrial facility. That’s really what these are and it’s how they should be viewed. Typically most people don’t want to live next door to a factory, but there are some places where it’s appropriate to build them, often remote land or former industrial sites (brownfields) where you don’t want housing due to previous contamination.
Even if invisible they would not be a popular neighbour because they are a very overt reminder to the poor people around them how uneven the wealth and political power distribution is between them and the tech exec owners?
They should be popular - they pay property taxes to the local schools without taking much from the community at all. (note that I'm coming out against the all too common tax breaks that they get to build in your city)
People in my area are complaining about data centers being built in rural fields and on former aluminum plant and power plant sites. The debate has become pretty detached from reality. What remains rooted in reality mostly comes down to electric bills / power consumption and the fact that, as everyone is saying, it's the only way for people to push back against big tech billionaires.
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:
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.
Residents of the state should get money for needing to live next to data centers and the use of their land/natural resources/etc, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund.
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.
The local government gets property taxes from these data centers.
Not if they get a sweetheart tax deal. Why do you think folks are so pissy? It’s like a sports stadium next to your house in that the principals get tax breaks, eminent domain, and other considerations, but it makes noise every day(not just weekends) and you don’t get to go to the game.
The sweetheart deals are usually from the state, sometimes the county. Town budgets tend to be so small that ~$20m/yr will have the council falling over themselves to approve it.
The problem, from the cases I have looked at, seems to be that towns want to do dumb shit with this money rather than just cut residents a tax break.
The sweetheart deals I've seen has been the state approving things that mostly affect the locals. A large part of property tax goes to local governments who were given no input in the deal.
Or the towns are not rich enough to fight in a lawsuit after the town council initially says no, which is how my local datacenter was approved against the will of the people
Even with a state sweetheart tax deal, the most populated county in my state gets half of its property tax income from a datacenter. Projection for one in my county looks like it would hit 70%.
tbh I'm more worried about the resource curse from the sudden change in budget
While specifics vary by state and county, data centers have often been getting 100% property tax abatements good for decades.
New rev source = spend more as opposed to reduce taxpayer burden?
Billionaires don’t pay taxes, they receive tax breaks.
You can just do this for everything everywhere with near-zero enforcement complexity by instituting a high Land Value Tax
You tell everyone AI is going to put them out of a job and then you’re surprised when working class communities say “no, please leave” when folks want to build a data center in their back yard.
There are times when Silicon Valley looks out of touch and there are times when Silicon Valley just looks like idiots with hubris. This is more the later.
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.
Archive link: http://archive.today/0Rxl7
I'm glad to see that people unite for things like this. This is important and necessary.
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.
Turns out putting them in space is the answer!
> Turns out putting them in space is the answer!
Can we put them on Mars, and maybe send Elon to tend them?
Anyone who has never lived next to a data center is commentating on the side lines without experience about what it’s actually like.
Lots of these commentaries miss the following: - noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging - rises costs of power and water - more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns
The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.
And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.
The intense anti-DC sentiment shouldn't be surprising - NIMBYism is the only viable mechanism available to people in the US. It doesn't matter if you're worried about Glonzo or have real concerns, they must be expressed in NIMBY terms in order to be heard.
For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.
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.
Do they promise?
There's lots of AI capex that is low risk. If it ends up being under utilized companies like Amazon and Google will adjust their capex plans. When they say things like under spending is riskier than overspending, for them, that's plausible.
But the sketchiest part of the bubble is when you directly bolt a no name data center company to Nvidia's cash pile, and you start turning cash into ever-lengthening receivables collection time, that's why people are skeptical of data centers: even if they can't tell a Google data center from a pivoting crypto bros data center, they smell the bullshit.
People also know they are being lied to, Oracle claims their New Mexico data center will run on Bloom fuel cells. I doubt Bloom is ready to scale to data center size without proof of concept in different applications at large if not directly comparable scale.
People don't want the billionaires coming into your town and having their way with it, the one you live in and are supposed to get a say in how things are done. This is not difficult to understand.
Consider:
1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];
2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and
3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].
All of this is relevant here.
The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.
So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.
So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.
This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/
[3]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc.
I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.
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).
Dictatorships abolish all free press, they don't like it. There was a quote where I live "Free press dies along democracy" and it did.
> 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.