I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them.
Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics.
There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.
The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns.
What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
It doesn't help that at least one datacenter operator and possibly more promised municipalities in Arizona that they wouldn't use their water and then secretly used millions of gallons. This in the middle of water shortages.
I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here, but 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year. It's really not that much water.
> 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year.
For a moment I was worried that this might be an average that includes indirect usage through industry and agriculture, but AFAICT no, it's in line with just residential usage, so good-on-ya for that.
> I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here
The utility claims it was 30m gallons over 4 months [0], and 90mgal/yr would be like ~3k individuals. This seems pretty significant given that Fayetteville is only about ~20k residents. [1]
I've been checking stats and comparing it with here (Spain) and I never thought the difference of residential water usage was so different.
Average use of water per capita in Spain is about 47m3 a year, so a third of the USA. And that number is quite consistent around the EU, except for Greece and Cyprus, where it's about double or even a bit more.
I think it's less the hard numbers than "promised not to use then used". It destroys trust in any future developments because you know you can't take them at their word.
This is the emotional truth that a lot of people are just not seeing.
It takes so long to build trust. It takes seconds to obliterate it. And big tech as a whole has been obliterating it's trust for like... a decade now.
You can't just isolate AI data centers, or even this potentially not-AI one, from everything else and be like "well opposition to this normal thing is ridiculous." Yes, it might well be. However there has been a pattern of abusive behavior on the part of AI DCs ranging from:
* Getting zoning approval seemingly against the will of a preponderance of local citizenry
* Taking water, or in vastly more quantities anyway, without permission
* Tapping water sources they weren't permitted for
* The above two of which, I'm pretty sure were only found out when water pressure started dropping in people's homes
* Similar to the above, energy demands causing residents to be told to turn down their air conditioning, during a heatwave no less
* Resulting in large scale change to the places people live, irrespective of benefits, that they didn't ask for, had no say in, and especially given it's for AI, likely have strong feelings about
* The general vibe lately that big tech is above the law, not just zoning laws but seemingly any laws they believe "stifle innovation"
Like, you can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And you can take this even further, expanding beyond just AI into things like the ongoing scandals with Flock cameras, Big Tech's involvement with Israel and it's war, the ongoing scourge that is social media, alongside the old classics: products are broken all the time, services are shut down with little warning, the price of every piece of tech and software seems to constantly be rising, many of which have become more or less essential to life, and at the top of all of these companies are, reliably, the richest people on the damn planet, who seemingly are only getting richer, all the time. TWO of them have their own SPACE programs for goodness sakes.
Like I'm sure the majority of people here especially see these things as progress, even aspirational, or at worst, a cost of doing business. What a lot of the public sees is a massive cohort of bullies and oligarchs, seemingly accountable to no one, who are so rich that they can simply ignore laws they deem beneath their ambitions with the pleased signoff of their government. That's not a good situation and simply saying "well they're just dumb luddites" is not a solution.
This shit is unstable.
People don't see tech as a benefit anymore, not remotely the way they used to anyway. It feels more and more like any time these companies make their presence known in your life, it's a threat to you, or things you care about. And if these companies don't start taking that seriously and try to mend some bridges, I think we're about to see the temperature really start to rise.
I can't get past the premise here that data centers are using material amounts of water. You took all the time to write this, but then included an assertion I think we all broadly know isn't true.
I think you’re completely sidestepping the point of the OPs post about “emotional truth”.
It’s indisputably true that a data center tapped a water supply without the supplier knowing about it and it caused water pressure in surrounding homes to drop:
Whether it was a “material amount” of water is pretty irrelevant here. “affects my home water supply and they didn’t pay for it” makes it plenty material for voters and just feeds into the existing narrative that these companies are stomping all over the will of everyday people.
I don’t really get the point you’re making. That it’s illogical? Sure. Voters often are. They still get to vote, though. Sometimes you have to sell an idea through emotion. “I assure you the data center is not using a material amount of water” is not going move the dial.
> You can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And, really, I don't think it's that their water usage is uniquely terrible, I think it's far more that their water usage feels unnecessary which goes back to the AI not doing much for regular people issue. Most people see AI features as intrusive nuisances, and even in the best of circumstances, a huge AI DC is going to need a lot of water, both directly for cooling, and indirectly via it's demand to the power grid. Virtually every method aside of solar we use to generate power requires pretty substantial amounts of water, if for nothing else than to boil it.
That doesn't mean that data center is using a huge, unbelievable amount of water, it's that whatever water it is using, which we know is at least substantial, is water that could be better used for other things. Nobody bats an eye at the amount of water used to make concrete or grow food or raise livestock, because we have to get around and build things, and we have to eat. But if you have this tech which is seemingly a lightning rod for nonsense that needs it's own special data centers that use tons of the stuff... people are gonna say something.
Why sweep for them? The industry promises/makes commitments with the intention of not keeping them and going through back channels. F em. They are a scumbag/untrustworthy/'we only technically broke the law' industry at this point.
Just like everything else, it depends! There are designs that don't really use that much water, but there are also ways to build these things that absolutely destroy the local water supply. It's a legitimate concern that shouldn't be a deal killer without any discussion, but it also should be discussed and considered and understood how any given project is planning to use water
I know of one example where this was a problem, it didn't destroy the local water supply but water usage was absolutely a problem. A family friend is a sales engineer for an industrial/commercial HVAC manufacturer and they had quoted a chiller that I think was basically a swamp cooler, in that it would constantly need new water as it cooled because it was using evaporative cooling
Turns out they could not get enough water from the local water utility and a ground water source was not clean enough so they had to build a water pipeline all the way to a neighboring town to supply water for the chillers
This is what I was talking about, depending on the HVAC setup it may be closed loop but also it could be evaporative swamp coolers that just absolutely destroy a ton of fresh water daily
> What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization
Companies often want to put data centers in the rural parts of blue states (like the southwest of Minnesota, where I live), where the locals are much more red and skeptical, if not outright hostile, toward renewables.
It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places.
The water sediment thing had nothing to do with the building being a data center I think? Any form of construction would interfere with people drinking well water next to it
Isn't that enough to rethink the construction - it takes a while to build a data center, and I would not be happy that I have to suffer with shitty water because a data center is being built for years.
They’re buying up undeveloped land that would not have been developed for any other reason. If the only developer is a problem, then it doesn’t matter if all developers are a problem.
Datacenters (1) use non-potable water during normal operation and (2) return most of the water they use to the water system, instead of consuming it (as opposed to, say, a golf course).
I didn’t get far until the semantics fall apart, you don’t care if it’s consumption or not when you don’t have water in your tap.
And it’s all based on theory, these plants are using systems far under dimensioned for the task, which is never a good thing. The problem with proponents for these behemoths is that they are all about theory and don’t live anywhere near the life they say is so great.
1. So basically the majority of rural people, so you are saying rural Americans should fight against every AI datacenter built in their area if they want to keep access to drinking water. OK.
2. The existing homeowners were there first. Their community has a commitment to ensure that the largest expense they will ever have, their home, is fit for purpose and not impacted by those that come after. If I move next to an airport, can I just have the airport shutdown? No. But a datacenter can just make homes un-inhabitable because 'that's just how it goes'? BS.
Construction (or at least of the type we're talking here, not fracking and tunneling and other things that affect the subsurface water table) interferes with surface water, not ground water.
…and you get to do that because you pay for clean water and sewage treatment. But that doesn’t mean some company can use the public sewers to dispose of as much bacteria-contaminated water as they like without paying for that externality.
0.) It shouldn’t be considered a national panic to ask States and communities to stop permitting this behavior.
1.) All bacteria is far from equal.
2.) Some of this wastewater is not problematic because of bacteria, but metals and other things - and some is being pumped into streams, not water treatment loops.
Unless I'm missing something, the fill-and-flush procedure that Meta's contractors used dumped waste water into the non-potable sewer system, and it never made its way into drinking water. Still room for Meta's contractors to improve. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/meta-datacen...
But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box.
I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc.
A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less.
It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
You're missing the point. Towns come out ahead when the people living there come out ahead. I'm not arguing with your math, but your math is also a straight line to a town with no people at all being better. Towns are for _people_.
Where do you get the premise that the people living there don't come out ahead?
You have something which, if it moves in, would pay more in property that than it consumes in services. Even at a significant discount to the ordinary property tax rate. If the net benefit after the discount is +$1M/year to the local coffers then the local people are benefiting in that amount, and it's easy to see numbers like that even after offering significant tax incentives.
You're shifting the goalposts from an earlier comment that claimed they would be "all drain". But that's ok, maybe you could compare that money to what a strip mall would provide in tax? I would find that analysis more convincing than just saying "reduced rate therefore bad", and would probably more accurately illuminate why localities make the decisions that they do.
The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
>Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
What's more, having a statutory abatement is only one way to get around property taxes. What you also see are things like a industrial revenue bonds. Those don't require a special law. They just shift the tax burden to the public.
Again, the idea here is that you're incentivizing investment and that will be offset by (a) jobs created by the facility, since labor doesn't get any tax abatement or deferment, (b) they will be bringing goods and service production to the area, and (c) eventually they will pay property taxes. For something like a traditional auto factory, that's a great incentive.
The issue is that data centers have almost no local labor required. A single McDonald's is likely to employ more individuals than a data center will. And the service they provide is essentially independent of the location. It doesn't matter if it's nearby. That provides almost no advantage. And with such a small labor pool and such a large potential tax burden, there may be no economic incentive to remain in the location instead of building a new data center by the time you reach the end of the abatement.
This notion that legislatures are blind to the number of jobs that will be created is contradicted by your previous link. You can scroll through table 2 for this- Alabama expects 20 jobs, Georgia 5-25, Nevada 10, etc. These states don't seem at all confused about how much local labor is required. And this is what they're setting as minimums; they believe that, absent mandate, the data centers would provide fewer jobs than these numbers.
Any source that they're confused about (b)? I believed you about (a) until I read your source- the notion that they're getting misled by construction job numbers was plausible- but I can't imagine how a government would be so fundamentally confused about what data centers are as to believe they'll provide local services or somehow goods.
What seems more likely to me is that the states/counties/cities believe that they will take in enough tax revenue while providing very little back in government resources that throwing in a discount works out just fine economically. I don't think you've made much of a case otherwise.
I work in construction,
- data centres included - in Australia.
From my experience you’re mostly right, however it’s more like, in order of priority: power availability, water availability, data availability, land price. Cost to upgrade upstream power transmission dwarfs all other costs.
I’d note that after construction ongoing jobs are minimal. Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. And probably 50% of those are low skill/income security,cleaning maintenance etc.
> Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion.
But that's not out of the norm for industrial activity. Like how many people do you think are actually working in an LTL hub or a paper mill or a food product factory at a given time? Probably about the same. You can see the parking lots and count cars on Google Earth.
The towns are estatic because compared to something that generates physical emissions or truck traffic data centers are pretty clean and low risk as long as the noise can be controlled.
One of the ways Californians prevented Walmarts from getting built was to prove how egregious a drain they were going to be. The stormwater runoff alone was breathtaking. Those parking lots and roofs are crazy.
First, Costco has some of the best employee treatment in the industry. Second, we are talking about blocking unwanted neighbors based on anything that will stick. We shouldn't have regulatory capture of socializing the liabilities and privatizing the profits, but we do and we have. Any resistance at all is by definition going to be a matter of coming at the problem sideways, up to and including fighting dirty.
Blocking unwanted neighbours with anything is exactly what NIMBYism is, and you could make similar arguments that housing developers are externalizing the burden of e.g. traffic or school capacity while privatizing the profits. Laws that enable arbitrary suppression of whatever the locals don’t like have caused generational damage via racism and now the housing crisis, and we should get rid of them.
Yep, and my free speech liberties mean that people can say horrible things to each other too. You can't have it both ways and we live in a society with people who have priorities that are misguided in different ways than our priorities are misguided. There's not one single person on this planet who is right all the time. Them's the breaks, wear a helmet.
NIMBY mostly blocks things that don't already have regulatory capture. Blocking things that are is fighting fire with fire.
I'm just addressing the text of your comment of incredulity at Walmart's building footprint. The tone of this one is different so I'll accept that as concession.
Property Tax revenue is surprisingly tiny from data centers in Quebec.
Some how DCs have low assessment for the building, like way lower then their resale value even.
> they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
Police - definitely not.
Roads on other hand, DCs are hauling new equipment / decommissioned equipment daily.
I'm in fact in favor of DCs, but tax revenue from them is not impressive at all. At least in Quebec.
I have no say in this process. Of course taxes are based on land and building assessed cost. Montreal and suburbs chose to assess condos at a market rate and even higher, while to assess detached house way below the market and assess data centers below the costs it was recently resold.
> The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes.
I can affirm that local fire departments are not spending resources preparing for data centre fires in any special way. However, I can attest a recently built DC used political means to dodge aspects of fire codes (mostly related to building road infrastructure for fire truck ingress).
Amazon also secured a 75% reduction in property taxes for 30 years.
Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room?
C02 fire suppression is rare in datacenters. That's more of an offshore thing in my experience (I design fire suppression systems for a living, and do life safety systems).
Typically server rooms are currently Fluoro-K / Novec123 if they have space constraints on the suppression systems. Those cylinders take up the least space per cubic foot of protected environments. These are less harmful than previous gasses like Halon, but still not good for the environment.
If you're lucky we get given ample room for cylinders and can go with Argon suppression systems, but that can take up more than 4 or 5 times the space alone and adds a lot of cost in engineering manifolds, etc.
CO2 takes up as much space as Argon systems and will kill someone who doesn't leave the hazard area before release so its generally not used in any datacenter project I've done.
Powerplant's at datacenters often use drychem systems instead or foam releasing systems.
That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster.
> Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you.
Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR.
> Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby
I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere.
Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace.
> because someone failed to do PR
They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion.
I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices.
The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer.
What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve?
If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them?
> If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer
My understanding is this wasn't done.
> What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices?
The most understandable explanations I've heard had to do with grid upgrades. Crap the utility owns and controls and has to change to accomodate the new power flows.
More often, however, it looks like local and state government engaging in industrial policy by trying to get residents to subsidise the new datacenters.
Upgrades also take time and may not be a good idea seeing how the current AI buildout is financed. There is a certain amount of capacity right now and AI behemoths have the financial muscle to take what's there. If that leaves too little for everyone else, prices will reflect that as soon as existing contracts allow.
I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…)
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4].
The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.)
Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem.
The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things.
The problem is not that subtle, the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy. The former aren't very problematic, often pretty good neighbors even, while the latter are nightmare fuel and will purposely not be built to be quiet and safe and stay within available energy capacity and not deplete struggling water tables, and they have the financial and political clout behind them to get away with pretty much anything. Small wonder no one wants them anywhere near them. Traditional DCs might be able to not be a nuisance despite using evaporative cooling, but no one would build that anywhere where there is a shortage of water, and the amount of heat to be dissipated by such a DC is way smaller.
But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs
and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble.
Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties.
>the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy
So you're saying that all the rules and laws and best practices that HN has cheered for over the years that apply to new construction and new industry and claim to be about sustainability and environmental protections (among other things) didn't actually do what they were sold as being able to do?
Either the new ones are cleaner (I suspect they are but the difference is probably mostly on paper), or we all got lied to.
I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs.
Nah, I back the Abundance movement and have voted for building new housing complexes in my town against groups who claimed it would ruin the character of our town to have a 60 acre plot near an old industrial center turned into neighborhoods.
Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building.
Because people aren't motivated by facts. They make up lies to justify their opposition: "water usage". But when you disprove that superstition with facts and logic, their opinion on water usage doesn't change. Its like as if you had said nothing at all.
Raise property taxes in the burbs significantly so they can pay for their own infrastructure instead of relying on being subsidized by the poorest people in the area.
Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall.
But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes.
If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method.
You’ve forgotten sales taxes and income taxes generated by shopping malls, which is a pretty big oversight. The square meters per employee is much lower for retail than for a data center. They’ve gotten quite good at keeping staffing low.
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.
This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.
Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.
Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount.
Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate.
(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)
Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right?
Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right?
I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways
First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't?
> Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc?
I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice!
But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right?
Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction?
(in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?)
(Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better)
No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of it. CHI1 is ringed by a single two-sided line of spots. Every big box retailer is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt larger than CHI1 itself.
It amuses me that you have consistently refused to draw the connection to this 'ocean' of asphalt and the purpose of the building it was designed for and are basically being obtuse.
But you know what is a better neighbour than a data centre or an office or a strip mall? A nice public park and local shops that support the community without you having to drive your car a distance that in any other country would be easily walkable.
Why would anybody want a monolithic megastructure sat next to their house that offers nothing good to the community itself? There is no upside for the locals. No improvement to quality of life.
You know what's even better than a nice public park?
A hospital and a university.
And if they don't generate taxes, they should fund a welfare program too.
That is what the discussion sounds like to me.
We turned from discussing whether data centers cause concrete issues to the point where authorities should intervene, to some sort of wish list for how data centers that are constructed far away from residents should provide great public benefits.
The data center might be more attractive but the office building provides more jobs and resources to the local community. You skipped that point in your reply. Even if most of the people working in the office building aren't from the area, those people are getting food and other services from local businesses. All that money goes to the local community and supports local businesses.
You'd take a featureless, opaque warehouse over a structure with windows and architecture that was intended to stand out? The asphalt doesn't have to be an eyesore if planned well, either. Copious vegetation woven throughout, painted teal or with murals instead of black, a policy of "after the following hours, locals are allowed to play roller-hockey and tennis here.", host regular farmer's markets, etc.
That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? The data centers? Also what does the specific building or set of buildings you hate in one town have to do with the concept of office buildings
I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.
> That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work?
Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople.
These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office.
I don't know what you think this link shows, but you can just jump to CHI1 on Google Maps (or, you know, drive there) to see what that area looks like.
It shows another generic large semi-industrial/semi-commercial building with a fancy facade around the lobby/reception area and a big blocky rectangular warehouse-style building behind it, with a little mechanical area outside of it. For a moment I thought I was staring at a satellite photo of parts of south San Jose, Sunnyvale or Newark. I can't even begin to count how many of these I've seen in my life. And counter to your point about aesthetics of an office building, I have seen plenty of office buildings that have nice shaded and tree-covered parking lots that aren't wide expanses of asphalt, with pleasant outdoor areas, and architecture that might not be exquisite, but fits well with the time and place it exists in.
I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?
Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.
I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.
> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot.
Manhattan (or any downtown business district) has lots of office towers with little asphalt, and many (small) businesses that make their living from office workers. Perhaps you are biased towards car-centric design thinking?
Toronto (for one) has condo towers next to (or not far from) business towers so many folks can walk, cycle, or take transit as their commute. And this is not a new concept:
> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community
This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit.
I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods.
Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue.
"Local businesses" are net money extractors. Local residents spend their money, a portion of which goes up the supply chain and out of the community.
Datacenters are net money injectors. Even if they provide relatively few jobs, or get tax breaks, they're still largely injecting capital that originates from outside the community.
>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate
The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)
The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.
I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape.
Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time.
Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity.
These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere.
They are also universally saying that AI's benefits far outweigh the challenges and will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity, health, and human capability.
> will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity
Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness.
So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.
>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise
For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space
I'm skeptical that they're actually surrounded by American prairie. What are the addresses of some of the data centers you're talking about?
Edit: I just see traditional American landscaping surrounding the CyrusOne data center in Aurora. I don't really see any native forbs or native grasses and it has a bunch of trees... where's the prairie?
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.
Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.
The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.
A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems
Where in Aurora? I’m at the CME DC daily, and I am not aware of any prairie green spaces that aren’t being actively developed. In fact the area between Bilter and Butterfield Rds are so active it’s changing my commute time to the DC — making my 10 minute ride often more than 30. So as someone who visits Aurora data centers daily I’m not seeing it.
The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.
I don't understand his point either. I used to work off of Diehl Road not too far from the CyrusOne DC[1] and it is anything but a prairie. It has greenery, but it's just the usual fake landscaping that all the industrial parks in Aurora, Bolingbrook, Warrenville, etc. do.
And there's counterexamples to the desolate office space... the Ace Hardware corporate office[2] I think is remarkably pleasant.
Plot a line from CHI1 to all of the nearest houses and get back to me with the the prices. I did one ray from CHI1 to Molitor Road and the first house I hit was over a half mil. Tell me more about the poor people these data centers inconvenience!
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.
This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers.
Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know?
> But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls
You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7.
Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.
No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything.
Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
Buddy I am writing this from that parking lot and I can hear quite a bit. I call bullshit. And suggest a hearing test, for real if you’re a DCO person get it checked on the regular.
Respectfully, I've done this recently and I don't believe you, but I'd be happy to place a bet with you and then drive out there and take decibel readings (I can go grab some hardwood at Owl to justify the trip).
This is plainly wrong considering many people's complaints about the ridiculous amount of noise these things spew out.
The whiring of gas turbines and cooling systems of complete, fully operational, data centres has nothing to do with construction.
> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
As modern datacenters go, 69,000 sq ft for a whole facility is REALLY small. Only some portion of that 69k is going to be actual conditioned space once you subtract all the ancillary services, things like security office, staging area, bathrooms, electrical breaker panel rooms, etc. It's almost like boutique/niche sized compared to the things that are going up in Texas, Indiana, a few other places. I know people building hyperscale size stuff that would almost call 69k sq ft hobby sized.
The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
> the user instead of in big centralized facilities
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
That's working under the (imo wrong) assumption that LLMs are what we need/want. First, because pushing toward the user can happen as shared hosting in your municipality and doesn't have to be in every home. Second, because if you take slop, adtech, and surveillance out of the equation, the material impact is several orders of magnitude less than what's being built today. Or for what it's worth, several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
1. Every single municipality would have AI data center "hosting in your municipality".
2. You'd have to majorly overbuild every municipality's capacity, as usage would likely have peak hours and 'dead' hours each day based on work, sleep, etc. if usage is local to that municipality.
> several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
Are you saying you believe already-built data centers are 100 times (2 orders of magnitude) as much as needed? I presume this is not what you think will actually happen in the real world though?
1. In the scenario i'm mentioning, there's no LLMs being deployed at all for end users. Social networks, netflix-style video and email fits in a single rack for thousands of people (tens of thousands?).
2. Yes. That's already the case. Today a single smartphone has enough CPU/RAM to host email services for many thousands of users. A single Netflix OCA 2U serves 400Gbit/s of video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738
The only reason we had huge DCs before LLMs was so Google/Facebook could spread their surveillance/adtech empire. Nothing of that scale is needed to provide useful services to end users.
We've "imported" this concern to the UK too, largely driven by the same issues seemingly whipped up by US lack of regulation much more than local examples (that's not to say there have been no cases of bad buildouts here).
Many of the people now extremely opposed to data centres seem to believe the UK didn't have any data centres recently, never mind that you can pass by data centres in e.g. London Docklands and mistake it for an office building. In some cases they are in a subset of floors of office buildings.
I'm all for regulating them so they need to account for externalities, but the blind opposition to them is frustrating, not least because it means there's no pressure to deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects.
The power supply issue is very real, though. UK has expensive electricity and high-megawattage data centers are obviously not going to help with that.
(The water issue doesn't pass the smell test for me because I expected data centers to be closed loop, but if it does apply? London is currently on a hosepipe ban!)
Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.
The power supply concern is real, but it's also "just" a regulatory issue. The UK has some expectations of paying for impact on the upstream power network, but the requirements are not nearly sufficient to deal with a massive increased demand.
Fixing regulations for that to require demonstrating commercial arrangements to fund additional supply to mitigate cost would address that, however, and that'd be a broader social good: Start out with the assumption that anything energy intensive must cover its externalities. Then you can selectively drop those requirements for things you consider sufficiently beneficial to justify socialising the cost.
More general-purpose regulations would be better, but local authorities can already to a large extend address this as part of the process of granting (or not) planning permission.
Regarding the water issue, it is real in places where it is insufficiently regulated - it's cheaper to dump the water many places. But it absolutely can be closed loop, and you can get district heating out of it. You just need to make the demands.
> Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.
Absolutely. But I also think that peoples real concerns will get harmed from going after data centres with arguments that are easy to dismiss instead of directing the criticism against the real issues.
> deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects
Two counterpoints:
- the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
- for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
> - the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
It may be in both, but there certainly are gaps in regulation as well. E.g. a new concern here is the effect on energy prices, where regulation to force large data centre projects to fund sufficient improvements to energy infrastructure would address it. But sure, it won't help if the regulations aren't enforced. That's seemingly a bigger concern in the US than in the UK.
E.g. we have at least two projects in London alone where waste heat from data centres will be fed into district heating loops. Using the planning process as a means to mitigate concerns with these projects works when the will is there and the regulations allow for it.
> - for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
The point is that if the angry mob points at X while the problem is Y, the angry mob isn't likely to get anything resolved even if/when politicians are sympathetic. If anything else, if your cynical about politicians: If a mob is focused on the wrong target, how likely do you think it is that a politician will try to find a way to take advantage of that rather than patiently explaining why they're focused on the wrong issue?
The problem is not more data centres. The problem is noise, water, energy. That problem is both not unique to data centres, and also not something that is an issue with all data centre projects. The right way of addressing that is to ensure that externalities are addressed and mitigation paid for irrespective of what gets built.
Maybe, but "this would probably have been fine five years ago" is not a very reassuring standard. The physical impact matters more than whether the racks are running email servers or training models.
A traditional colo DC isn't running super power dense GPUs and doesn't use water cooling. These exist in whatever city you live in and no one knows where they are because there is no impact. They are completely different beasts.
> There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).
Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?
>Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space
Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point
Correct, it was absorbed by crypto bros. And now many of them are attempting to offload to AI. Ban crypto datacenters and there’s plenty of additional capacity available. There’s a reason China did almost a decade ago now.
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws. I would personally vote against polticians who enacted those kinds of regulations; and if they passed anyway I would attempt to mine and use cryptocurrency in ways that circumvented the regulations banning me from doing so.
>> The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws.
Thats exactly correct. The killer app for crypto is criminal enterprise. Yes there are other niches, but nothing that would sustain the industry.
Passing a regulation regarding mining would be difficult to enforce. It's impossible to know what a GPU inside the data center is doing.
At this point the industry is legit, even promoted by individuals in govt (who overtly sell access (cough bribe) using it. So no, you don't need to worry, there's no risk of regulations like this anywhere soon.
You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana
You can't without making an effort to reduce your dependence on it. The most anti DC people I see are chronically online blasting their shit all over social media. Typically influencers, who make a living using said DCs, all day long. Social media directly supports what they are against. There are other ways to spread your message and when they choose the one method that directly goes against the message they are trying to put out, I'm not going to take them seriously, and will also assume they don't know what they're talking about.
The most anti DC people are not chronically online, if at all. Just because Youtube influencers exist doesn't mean they're anything close to the average concerned citizen.
See also, how many people here in France were jailed for sabotaging 5G antennas during their buildout.
So what? It's good to have people question the status quo. Shut the stupid AI craze down before it finishes destroying whatever's left of our planet.
Or are you not concerned that AI companies are now the n°1 fossil fuel lobbyists in EU/USA? That they are consuming insane amounts of concrete and electricity for 0 gains for citizens (but enormous gains for the elites)?
> Shut the stupid AI craze down before it finishes destroying whatever's left of our planet.
I think a lot of the protestors are using data center protests as a proxy for some other belief like this. They think slowing down a data center is going to stop the future from occurring, which is an illogical fantasy on many different levels.
I think that’s how DCs mark an exponential growth in NIMBYism and its acceptance - we’re already seeing city-wide, county-wide, even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density. If this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted, I expect to see similar broader bans against multi-family housing, mass-transit, etc.
Based on what? Slippery slope fallacy? There are real reasons why people don’t want their community to have a DC, which are wildly different than the entitled NIMBYism that isn’t against multi-family housing and mass transit.
Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Many of the same reasons used against dense housing, mass transit, and solar/wind turbines are used against DCs -
such as claims:
* That it would be too much for the existing grid to handle
* That it would be too much for existing other utilities to handle
* That it would be too close to x other thing (zoo, etc)
* Some say it won't be visually appealing
* That it would change the nature of the existing area
* That there isn't enough groundwater
* etc.
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Wouldn't the complaints then be that a DC there would spoil the area's natural beauty (and would be too much for the electric grid there, etc)? Or if the DC were located similarly to how this one is, there would be the same complaints as OP case - see the photo at the very top of the OP article - it shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
>> even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
1. You say you would change your mind in that particular place, but are you arguing that others wouldn't NIMBY against Atherton if one were proposed there? Everyone has different ideas about where they believe should be NIMBYd, including because people have different 'backyards'? And I presume your 'backyard' is tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles from the OP DC location?
2. With state-level bans already existing in states where much of the state is very low-density, the evidence seems to show the opposite of your claim that if a very low-density area were picked then it wouldn't face a ban.
>we’re already seeing city-wide, county-wide, even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
Are we actually though? I bet you heard about the Maine datacenter moratorium that passed our state legislature. It generated tons of conversation here on HN.
Did you also hear that our Democrat governor vetoed it, and it did not become law?
How many of these moratoriums are actually getting into the law?
New York also enacted a moratorium, and in recent days Texas stopped any new data center from being connected to the grid (the Texas one was done through the governor’s power over the grid).
The Internet we are talking on didn't require the current unsustainable data center build-out. This is like saying that people complain about companies dumping toxic waste when they themselves poop. Scale matters.
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
I work in commercial real and even I'm going to go NIMBY mode on this lol. This property shares a large boundary to the zoo and I have a very hard time believing you won't cause an impact (noise pollution eg) to the animals next door.
Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.
IMO noise pollution is the easiest one to solve: just put all the AC fans on the far side of the datacenter. If not enough, surround with noise absorbing panels. If not enough, just get a different fan design, more coolers, and run them at half speed. They can even afford Noctua :)
I bet nearby rail yard produces way more loud noises.
Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.
You don't need to block the airway. Air and sound move differently, so you absorb on paths that sounds likes to travel and minimize obstruction on the air path. Something akin to a Tesla valve.
I'm willing to bet that you can make the exhaust noise near inaudible if you want to. Problem is, it costs a couple 10k dollars or so, and why pay for that if you can just fuck over the neighbour instead?
Tesla valve noise cancellers are not a thing that exists. Why don't you go and invent them before telling the rest of us we should just buy them for $200 each?
But I think even with just a basic understanding of physics its clear that something like this could work. It also does not have to be a Tesla valve precisely. There are all kinds of mufflers and some of them can no doubt be applied at industrial scale - if one is willing to pay a reasonable amount of money.
As I understand, initially, the power production was done on-site using gas turbines. Later, these were moved to Mississippi and a high voltage powerline connected the two sites. After this change, why is the Memphis data center not clean and ecofriendly for residents of Memphis?
Later is just as likely to never happen, as happen. Billionaires have promised all sorts of things to get tax breaks for the things they want and never followed through with the parts that benefited others.
Nothing that uses as much power as a modern data center is anywhere close to the most clean eco friendly business imaginable. Even one on 100% renewables, which most very much are not, is hurting the environment far more than many industries. Green energy isn't "free", it's just less harmful than the alternatives.
Ok, what large business would you say is more eco friendly?
A fun story, for electric generation, Washington state produces and exports a lot of electricity because they are blessed with convenient hydropower. But WA still don't want to build data centers for some reason, even though they a the best positioned to.
Messing with the zoo was a really bad idea - it is extremely popular, has higher attendance than professional sports in our market, and Nashville is full of celebrities who immediately hit their socials to condemn it.
There is lots of land outside the city but then you can't piggyback on infrastructure so it is more expensive. That's my primary objection - if this is so important why not spend the money to put it somewhere it is likely to have less of an impact on your neighbors?
This is more a harbinger of what is about to happen all over the country. So the specifics matter less than it marking the political ascendancy of the backlash to AI / data centers / big tech / billionaires...
> Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels?
Can they break those promises easily?
Sure, you can sue, but while those suits move through courts, everyone else suffers.
One of the guys leading the effort is active on threads (probably twitter too). He has no interest in negotiating. He is gloating over his win hardcore and has very absolutist views when it comes to datacenters
Hat tip for the additional source. I have no love for people in this fight looking for a "total win/defeat". It is a dumb way to approach large construction projects. Can you share some links to the Threads account?
Once you get audience captured on a single topic like that, you are damned to being the biggest champion of it forever.
Happened to lots of influencers during the whole vax debacle of COVID. Mostly sane people who didn't catch a big break until they mentioned there might be mercury in the covid vax. Five years later and they are still tugging those lines.
What I think is nice is that the political parties opposed to data center development are actually taking concrete steps, exercising specific powers, to advance their goals.
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
If the city thinks data centers are incompatible with certain areas, it should encode that through zoning, permitting, utility pricing, noise limits, etc.
We have those but data centers keep skirting them. Data center developers often classify their properties as "light industrial" or "warehouse" to bypass regulation. These lobbyists are also big enough to push state legislation that strips local towns and counties of land-use authority.
Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound
Probably zoning and anti-corruption laws too. That's why I think moratoriums like what Maine did are incredibly important. We should take our time and make sure things are done right. Pro-data center people who oppose those things are digging their own graves
> In late July, the Metro Council approved new zoning and related restrictions on data center development and implemented a moratorium on new permit approvals to run through Dec. 1.
I feel like that is besides the point. I think the fact that ended up this way is an illustration how hardened the public has become. There's no niceties, procedure. The public has been pushed well past that point. This is not a negotiation.
Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.
Eminent domain is almost always used to make corporations richer. In other parts of the country, eminent domain is being used to seize people's homes to build AI DCs.
~45% of people work for companies of less than 500 people, ~12% for the govrnment (federal, state, local), ~6% are self employed. That leaves less than a half for all the companies >500, and only a tiny minority of them have an outsized influence on politics.
EDIT: Also, if there were no big corporations, people would still work and pay taxes. No sane statesman would purposefully build their countries economy on non-state-controlled megacorps.
No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.
It's kind of strange how the state ("of, by, and for the people") and corporations (comprised of people) are such distinct entities with their own interests. The fact that the state and corporations can and do collude in opposition to the public good is at the heart of so many enormous problems.
It feels like this is the first time I've seen the political system move in tune with the public mood in regards to AI and this is public anger finding expression in public policy.
Even billionaires really don't operate as individuals, they are a monster that we've let grow to have unchecked power across the entire federal government.
(note, I may be agreeing with what you're saying I just don't agree with the framing of the "individual") Most of the pushback belongs against the entities that are more powerful than even the federal government at times.)
I live in Nashville. This story is all over the place in general. People assume all the things like it will make their rates go up, etc.
I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.
It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.
Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.
But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).
Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.
I spent most of my IBEW apprenticeship working in data centers of all sizes (5-300,000 sqft), and micro co-location facilities (like DCb's) are entirely different from the likes of the AWSes and cryptomining operations of this world (250,000sqft+).
Happy for the zoo exhibits/animals, but this particular co-lo wasn't even among the egregious data center owners.
----
My recommendation to data center planners: small cities have cheaper land, and lots of love/power/cronyism. You may get further by buddying up with the smaller fishes/communities.
> Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.
When a new DC is being proposed, how do you tell - for sure - whether it'll be quiet and discreet, vs. loud and noisy?
Agreed and disagreed. It is a terrible precedent for sure. On the other hand, government inaction, usually hiding behind arcane codes, process, and blame circles gets really frustrating. In that world, they'd still be waiting on a court date(if even) when the data center cuts its ribbon.
It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.
Nashville politics operate in an extremely narrow window.
The local government has a degree of autonomy, but there are unspoken checks on it by a generally hostile state government. Nashville is represented by Democrats while the state is controlled by Republicans. There is an implicit threat that if the city fails to pursue the state's objectives the state will punish it.
Recently the city angered the state because it refused to hold the Republican convention. The state retaliated by passing a law to shrink the Nashville city council and another to take control of its airport. The state also took control of the Nashville tourism board that has a slush fund paid for by city taxes.
There is a direct line between state reps and local politicians. So for example when state lobbyists were angered at the loss of parking due to a bike lane they called up a council member to have the lane removed.
Which is all to say that the stadium deal was ordered by the state and not something the city had a real say in.
If the datacenter people go and cozy up to the governor or legislators the state will lean on the city again and they will ram it through as well.
They want it to look more full because no one likes watching the Titans suck wind year after year, so the old stadium was laughably empty when the cameras panned over the stands.
I'm not joking. This is the reason I heard for them making it smaller.
We’ve been building data centers for many decades without problems. I used to service equipment at some in my area. Many had big chunks of green space around them, very desirable to live near.
You can't think of a single new development in the situation?
Sorry to be snide - you can certainly make an argument that the demands of AI should not affect public perception of data centers, but you should simply make that argument, rather than mysteriously omitting any reference to the issue.
Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.
AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.
Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.
There is a medical office building near my house along my walking route. It has a fancy, detached, fully enclosed generator building. When the generators are running the place emits a really high-pitched whine.
I can hear it approaching from a couple blocks away. I'm sure my dog and other animals hear it much better than me.
My sincere theory is that this is finally the government/politics stepping in to take their cut from the AI revolution. The politicians now have a fee-based strategy where they can literally just stick a fee on any upcoming project(s). Pay up if you ever want your permits to go through and construction to get started.
You don't need a conspiracy theory. All these data centers were going up in rural/near rural areas that voted for this, but then the data centers made everyone else's electric bills go up.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
> I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
Exactly my sentiment. I don't even understand how this is controversial. The only ones who don't seem to get it are everyone making the plans (including the folks in government)
They're just trying to reduce the risk and lead time to gain an advantage. I'm a huge AI supporter and there's no way to advocate for them. They've just blown all the good will out of the water.
While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power
> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
They did it because people didn't want a data center next to the zoo. There was a huge backlash against it, and the locals are very happy that they were listened to, I can promise you. No conspiracy theory necessary.
I understand location is important for web/traditional data centers but why do they put these AI centers so close to people? Could they not put them somewhere far away like maybe in the middle some Nebraska farmland where it's just miles and miles of corn everywhere or the desert? I guess water would be an issue but it's closed loop no? Couldn't they just truck in the water and re use it or something?
I think it's ironic that we have no problem putting DCs next to a prison but god forbid we put them next to a zoo which is the same thing but for animals.
You're saying it's ok to torture humans with something that's unacceptable for zoo animals provided they broke some laws. That's the part I'm taking issue with.
It blows my mind that (my fellow) Americans are so averse to taxation that they don't even consider that option. Whether you're worried about jobs or faraway tech elites or resource usage....just go straight to the source and use freaking taxes. Blocking is so pointless. All this political will could be a huge opportunity for these locales but instead it's petulant obstructionism.
The Millenium Scholarship program in Nevada paid for tons of kids' education by taxing casinos. It's not perfect but it's channeling economic activity to the people.
That gives the local voting population the ability to decide how much they're willing to put up with data centres. And a state that has excess water and electricity can have tax breaks and then that's where more data centres go.
Big Tech has accumulated too many grievances across too many segments of society and made too much money in the process, so let's not act surprised at a backlash. And data centers are remarkably well-suited as a focal point for people to express those accumulated grievances. So I wouldn't look too hard at all the many and varied reasons that data centers are being opposed, but instead at the quickness and ferocity and consistency with which they are being opposed. It reminds of the movement in the US and Canada in the 90's to oppose unfettered globalization - though this already feels larger and more widespread (and less late to the party).
What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
The craziest thing about Metro Nashville (the city/county entity we are discussing) is that the wealthiest enclaves (independent cities) voted to retain certain city-powers (because of course they did!) – mostly Southern Davidson County, as you approach WilCo/Franklin.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
VA independent cities aren't that, though. They're what they say on the tin: Cities without a county, they're not a nominal county and city both existing on paper but governed as one
Yes, Nashville has a huge number of council members, and it's much better that way. I moved from there to Seattle, and there's 9 council members (7 districts + 2 city-wide) here so we share a representative with a huge area (six times the people and two and a half times the land) and our local concerns have no voice.
I wonder if we're heading toward a split where "AI data centers" and traditional cloud infrastructure are treated as completely different categories. Five years ago, a new data center mostly meant more capacity for the internet. Today, many communities seem to assume it means tens of thousands of GPUs, massive power demand, noise, and water usage. AI has clearly changed public perception, but I'm curious how much of the opposition is actually new versus concerns that already existed around land use, noise, and power. For people who work in infrastructure, has the approval process genuinely become harder because of AI, or has AI mainly amplified concerns that were already there?
The real issue seems to be that local zoning and utility planning never caught up with the scale of modern data centers. If a project can consume huge amounts of power, generate constant noise, affect a neighboring zoo, those costs should be addressed before the land is sold and hundreds of millions are committed.
I’m surprised that there is no discussion here about the practice of using NDAs to bypass / prevent residents of local communities from learning about data centers about to be built or being able to provide any kind of input via the democratic process before it’s too late and construction has already started.
People are royally pissed off by the sheer arrogance of these data center people and Silicon Valley assholes who think they can just impose their will on places.
Pizzagate is a false conspiracy theory driven entirely by outrage culture perpetuating falsehoods and online hysteria. What's the disconnect in their example?
Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
Go ahead and go live next to one then and show us how it's nothing but propaganda.
Quite convenient how the same people trying to run roughshod over the others to get these bubble mania mausoleums built NEVER live near them but are HAPPY to make others who can't afford a second home live next to them.
>the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
Really? You think the American way of life today is comparable to 1821?
You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].
The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].
Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.
>You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk.
If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want to live in Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon's Borg cube you're in for a few rough decades, on both sides of the political spectrum that is.
In speaking with non-technical friends who are anti-data centers, I get the impression that they only recently discovered what a data center even was and are oblivious to how much they use data centers in their daily lives outside of AI.
But I don’t fault them even if they’re misinformed. AI is a big power grab by the wealthy and people feel helpless and are acting in the only way they think they can.
I don't know that those timelines make sense; there were highways going through San Francisco... until the Loma Prieta earthquake; and then suddenly not. A cursory look at what Freeway Revolt was, seems to point to a movement in the 1950-1960's, rather than the early 1990's.
I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them.
Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics.
There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.
The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns.
What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
It doesn't help that at least one datacenter operator and possibly more promised municipalities in Arizona that they wouldn't use their water and then secretly used millions of gallons. This in the middle of water shortages.
I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here, but 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year. It's really not that much water.
> 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year.
For a moment I was worried that this might be an average that includes indirect usage through industry and agriculture, but AFAICT no, it's in line with just residential usage, so good-on-ya for that.
> I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here
The utility claims it was 30m gallons over 4 months [0], and 90mgal/yr would be like ~3k individuals. This seems pretty significant given that Fayetteville is only about ~20k residents. [1]
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/fayettevillecit...
I've been checking stats and comparing it with here (Spain) and I never thought the difference of residential water usage was so different.
Average use of water per capita in Spain is about 47m3 a year, so a third of the USA. And that number is quite consistent around the EU, except for Greece and Cyprus, where it's about double or even a bit more.
A whole lot of Americans water their lawns consistently for months on end.
Keep in mind that a lot of Americans outside of urban areas also get their water from their own private wells, making water use effectively moot.
I dont get your math. 50m3/y is more than 30m3/y, which is what I calculated for the US?
I'm not sure which numbers everyone is using, but
[0] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-factsSpain and EU are like eg Connecticut
Care to elaborate?
Climate-wise I presume. Spain sits on a similar latitude to Connecticut, and much of the EU sits north of the US population.
I think it's less the hard numbers than "promised not to use then used". It destroys trust in any future developments because you know you can't take them at their word.
This is the emotional truth that a lot of people are just not seeing.
It takes so long to build trust. It takes seconds to obliterate it. And big tech as a whole has been obliterating it's trust for like... a decade now.
You can't just isolate AI data centers, or even this potentially not-AI one, from everything else and be like "well opposition to this normal thing is ridiculous." Yes, it might well be. However there has been a pattern of abusive behavior on the part of AI DCs ranging from:
* Getting zoning approval seemingly against the will of a preponderance of local citizenry
* Taking water, or in vastly more quantities anyway, without permission
* Tapping water sources they weren't permitted for
* The above two of which, I'm pretty sure were only found out when water pressure started dropping in people's homes
* Similar to the above, energy demands causing residents to be told to turn down their air conditioning, during a heatwave no less
* Resulting in large scale change to the places people live, irrespective of benefits, that they didn't ask for, had no say in, and especially given it's for AI, likely have strong feelings about
* The general vibe lately that big tech is above the law, not just zoning laws but seemingly any laws they believe "stifle innovation"
Like, you can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And you can take this even further, expanding beyond just AI into things like the ongoing scandals with Flock cameras, Big Tech's involvement with Israel and it's war, the ongoing scourge that is social media, alongside the old classics: products are broken all the time, services are shut down with little warning, the price of every piece of tech and software seems to constantly be rising, many of which have become more or less essential to life, and at the top of all of these companies are, reliably, the richest people on the damn planet, who seemingly are only getting richer, all the time. TWO of them have their own SPACE programs for goodness sakes.
Like I'm sure the majority of people here especially see these things as progress, even aspirational, or at worst, a cost of doing business. What a lot of the public sees is a massive cohort of bullies and oligarchs, seemingly accountable to no one, who are so rich that they can simply ignore laws they deem beneath their ambitions with the pleased signoff of their government. That's not a good situation and simply saying "well they're just dumb luddites" is not a solution.
This shit is unstable.
People don't see tech as a benefit anymore, not remotely the way they used to anyway. It feels more and more like any time these companies make their presence known in your life, it's a threat to you, or things you care about. And if these companies don't start taking that seriously and try to mend some bridges, I think we're about to see the temperature really start to rise.
I can't get past the premise here that data centers are using material amounts of water. You took all the time to write this, but then included an assertion I think we all broadly know isn't true.
I think you’re completely sidestepping the point of the OPs post about “emotional truth”.
It’s indisputably true that a data center tapped a water supply without the supplier knowing about it and it caused water pressure in surrounding homes to drop:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center...
Whether it was a “material amount” of water is pretty irrelevant here. “affects my home water supply and they didn’t pay for it” makes it plenty material for voters and just feeds into the existing narrative that these companies are stomping all over the will of everyday people.
You're right: I'm not taking seriously the idea of "emotional truth".
I don’t really get the point you’re making. That it’s illogical? Sure. Voters often are. They still get to vote, though. Sometimes you have to sell an idea through emotion. “I assure you the data center is not using a material amount of water” is not going move the dial.
You should. Emotional truths get people killed and buildings burned just as effectively as real ones. Arguably even more effectively than real ones.
As I said:
> You can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.
And, really, I don't think it's that their water usage is uniquely terrible, I think it's far more that their water usage feels unnecessary which goes back to the AI not doing much for regular people issue. Most people see AI features as intrusive nuisances, and even in the best of circumstances, a huge AI DC is going to need a lot of water, both directly for cooling, and indirectly via it's demand to the power grid. Virtually every method aside of solar we use to generate power requires pretty substantial amounts of water, if for nothing else than to boil it.
That doesn't mean that data center is using a huge, unbelievable amount of water, it's that whatever water it is using, which we know is at least substantial, is water that could be better used for other things. Nobody bats an eye at the amount of water used to make concrete or grow food or raise livestock, because we have to get around and build things, and we have to eat. But if you have this tech which is seemingly a lightning rod for nonsense that needs it's own special data centers that use tons of the stuff... people are gonna say something.
Well, then quit beating up a straw man and come reply to the other thread you abandoned regarding what they’re putting into the water. =]
I don’t see DC water usage to be a problem, currently.
I think I'd rather 33 people get the water.
Good thing you don't get to decide.
The mayor of Nashville is elected.
Did they commit that they were only going to use 1 million gallons? I got the impression they committed to not using the communities water?
Why sweep for them? The industry promises/makes commitments with the intention of not keeping them and going through back channels. F em. They are a scumbag/untrustworthy/'we only technically broke the law' industry at this point.
>The water thing is, I think, baloney
Just like everything else, it depends! There are designs that don't really use that much water, but there are also ways to build these things that absolutely destroy the local water supply. It's a legitimate concern that shouldn't be a deal killer without any discussion, but it also should be discussed and considered and understood how any given project is planning to use water
> there are also ways to build these things that absolutely destroy the local water supply
Has this happened somewhere?
I know of one example where this was a problem, it didn't destroy the local water supply but water usage was absolutely a problem. A family friend is a sales engineer for an industrial/commercial HVAC manufacturer and they had quoted a chiller that I think was basically a swamp cooler, in that it would constantly need new water as it cooled because it was using evaporative cooling
Turns out they could not get enough water from the local water utility and a ground water source was not clean enough so they had to build a water pipeline all the way to a neighboring town to supply water for the chillers
This is what I was talking about, depending on the HVAC setup it may be closed loop but also it could be evaporative swamp coolers that just absolutely destroy a ton of fresh water daily
> What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization
Companies often want to put data centers in the rural parts of blue states (like the southwest of Minnesota, where I live), where the locals are much more red and skeptical, if not outright hostile, toward renewables.
> The water thing
It’s amazing how Karen Hao managed to graduate from MIT without learning the difference between m^3 and L
> The water thing is, I think, baloney
It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places.
What exactly are you saying is baloney?
The water sediment thing had nothing to do with the building being a data center I think? Any form of construction would interfere with people drinking well water next to it
Isn't that enough to rethink the construction - it takes a while to build a data center, and I would not be happy that I have to suffer with shitty water because a data center is being built for years.
What I mean is that it’s got nothing to do with data centers. Saying “data centers pollute water” is misleading, in these situations
1) we’re talking about people pulling unfiltered untreated well water
2) any building would have had exactly the same effect.
They’re buying up undeveloped land that would not have been developed for any other reason. If the only developer is a problem, then it doesn’t matter if all developers are a problem.
What? How is a data center that runs insane amounts of water through it every single day the same as a warehouse with a tap and bathroom?
And sure, a rocket launch pad would also cause issues, but now it’s a data center that is doing it, let’s not argue fictional realities.
It’s not: the datacenter likely consumes less.
Datacenters (1) use non-potable water during normal operation and (2) return most of the water they use to the water system, instead of consuming it (as opposed to, say, a golf course).
I have yet to read anyone more compelling than Andy Masley on this: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
(This isn’t a topic I know much about personally, so am open to being persuaded otherwise!)
I didn’t get far until the semantics fall apart, you don’t care if it’s consumption or not when you don’t have water in your tap. And it’s all based on theory, these plants are using systems far under dimensioned for the task, which is never a good thing. The problem with proponents for these behemoths is that they are all about theory and don’t live anywhere near the life they say is so great.
https://youtu.be/2Eltf06-NiQ
1. So basically the majority of rural people, so you are saying rural Americans should fight against every AI datacenter built in their area if they want to keep access to drinking water. OK.
2. The existing homeowners were there first. Their community has a commitment to ensure that the largest expense they will ever have, their home, is fit for purpose and not impacted by those that come after. If I move next to an airport, can I just have the airport shutdown? No. But a datacenter can just make homes un-inhabitable because 'that's just how it goes'? BS.
Construction (or at least of the type we're talking here, not fracking and tunneling and other things that affect the subsurface water table) interferes with surface water, not ground water.
I am not talking about sediment, or anything construction-related.
This is normal operations being done irresponsibly:
1.) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/meta-datacen...
2.) https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/saline-township-residen...
Did you read the guardian article? It’s a bit of a nothing-burger, are we really going to have a national panic based on that?
> flushed bacteria-contaminated water into public sewers
I do that every morning
…and you get to do that because you pay for clean water and sewage treatment. But that doesn’t mean some company can use the public sewers to dispose of as much bacteria-contaminated water as they like without paying for that externality.
or flush it off into the woods, because they got a local politician to sign off.
With lithium or whatever, in your waste…
0.) It shouldn’t be considered a national panic to ask States and communities to stop permitting this behavior.
1.) All bacteria is far from equal.
2.) Some of this wastewater is not problematic because of bacteria, but metals and other things - and some is being pumped into streams, not water treatment loops.
Unless I'm missing something, the fill-and-flush procedure that Meta's contractors used dumped waste water into the non-potable sewer system, and it never made its way into drinking water. Still room for Meta's contractors to improve. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/meta-datacen...
> ...which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal.
Isn't it technically legal, but obviously offends the spirit of the law (and being a good neighbor) by driving a bus through a loophole?
But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box.
I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
They're all drain.
This is the opposite of the truth. For instance:
https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
How is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions?
The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates.
50% off energy taxes.
Reduced property taxes.
I could go on.
https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo...
Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption?
Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc.
A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less.
It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead?
You're missing the point. Towns come out ahead when the people living there come out ahead. I'm not arguing with your math, but your math is also a straight line to a town with no people at all being better. Towns are for _people_.
Where do you get the premise that the people living there don't come out ahead?
You have something which, if it moves in, would pay more in property that than it consumes in services. Even at a significant discount to the ordinary property tax rate. If the net benefit after the discount is +$1M/year to the local coffers then the local people are benefiting in that amount, and it's easy to see numbers like that even after offering significant tax incentives.
It's for the people if they are stuck with a negative tax base and no way out. You either expand tax base or shrink it.
A DC [can be] a good stop gap as it increases tax base for the city while not requiring additional services that cost tax dollars.
Either that, or everyone's property taxes go up.
You're shifting the goalposts from an earlier comment that claimed they would be "all drain". But that's ok, maybe you could compare that money to what a strip mall would provide in tax? I would find that analysis more convincing than just saying "reduced rate therefore bad", and would probably more accurately illuminate why localities make the decisions that they do.
No, it's exactly the truth:
https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a...
The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
I'd think that the claim
>Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
11 states have them specifically for data centers.
Most states have some form of this in general: https://www.michiganbusiness.org/services/pa-198/
What's more, having a statutory abatement is only one way to get around property taxes. What you also see are things like a industrial revenue bonds. Those don't require a special law. They just shift the tax burden to the public.
Again, the idea here is that you're incentivizing investment and that will be offset by (a) jobs created by the facility, since labor doesn't get any tax abatement or deferment, (b) they will be bringing goods and service production to the area, and (c) eventually they will pay property taxes. For something like a traditional auto factory, that's a great incentive.
The issue is that data centers have almost no local labor required. A single McDonald's is likely to employ more individuals than a data center will. And the service they provide is essentially independent of the location. It doesn't matter if it's nearby. That provides almost no advantage. And with such a small labor pool and such a large potential tax burden, there may be no economic incentive to remain in the location instead of building a new data center by the time you reach the end of the abatement.
This notion that legislatures are blind to the number of jobs that will be created is contradicted by your previous link. You can scroll through table 2 for this- Alabama expects 20 jobs, Georgia 5-25, Nevada 10, etc. These states don't seem at all confused about how much local labor is required. And this is what they're setting as minimums; they believe that, absent mandate, the data centers would provide fewer jobs than these numbers.
Any source that they're confused about (b)? I believed you about (a) until I read your source- the notion that they're getting misled by construction job numbers was plausible- but I can't imagine how a government would be so fundamentally confused about what data centers are as to believe they'll provide local services or somehow goods.
What seems more likely to me is that the states/counties/cities believe that they will take in enough tax revenue while providing very little back in government resources that throwing in a discount works out just fine economically. I don't think you've made much of a case otherwise.
You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to?
I work in construction, - data centres included - in Australia.
From my experience you’re mostly right, however it’s more like, in order of priority: power availability, water availability, data availability, land price. Cost to upgrade upstream power transmission dwarfs all other costs.
I’d note that after construction ongoing jobs are minimal. Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. And probably 50% of those are low skill/income security,cleaning maintenance etc.
> Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion.
But that's not out of the norm for industrial activity. Like how many people do you think are actually working in an LTL hub or a paper mill or a food product factory at a given time? Probably about the same. You can see the parking lots and count cars on Google Earth.
The towns are estatic because compared to something that generates physical emissions or truck traffic data centers are pretty clean and low risk as long as the noise can be controlled.
A state and a municipality are different things.
One of the ways Californians prevented Walmarts from getting built was to prove how egregious a drain they were going to be. The stormwater runoff alone was breathtaking. Those parking lots and roofs are crazy.
Walmarts have more stormwater runoff than Costcos?
I think you can do better than a whataboutism.
First, Costco has some of the best employee treatment in the industry. Second, we are talking about blocking unwanted neighbors based on anything that will stick. We shouldn't have regulatory capture of socializing the liabilities and privatizing the profits, but we do and we have. Any resistance at all is by definition going to be a matter of coming at the problem sideways, up to and including fighting dirty.
Blocking unwanted neighbours with anything is exactly what NIMBYism is, and you could make similar arguments that housing developers are externalizing the burden of e.g. traffic or school capacity while privatizing the profits. Laws that enable arbitrary suppression of whatever the locals don’t like have caused generational damage via racism and now the housing crisis, and we should get rid of them.
Yep, and my free speech liberties mean that people can say horrible things to each other too. You can't have it both ways and we live in a society with people who have priorities that are misguided in different ways than our priorities are misguided. There's not one single person on this planet who is right all the time. Them's the breaks, wear a helmet.
NIMBY mostly blocks things that don't already have regulatory capture. Blocking things that are is fighting fire with fire.
I'm just addressing the text of your comment of incredulity at Walmart's building footprint. The tone of this one is different so I'll accept that as concession.
> Property Tax revenue
Property Tax revenue is surprisingly tiny from data centers in Quebec. Some how DCs have low assessment for the building, like way lower then their resale value even.
> they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
Police - definitely not.
Roads on other hand, DCs are hauling new equipment / decommissioned equipment daily.
I'm in fact in favor of DCs, but tax revenue from them is not impressive at all. At least in Quebec.
Then change how property is calculated? Virginia taxes business-owned property based on the land and the contents within.
I have no say in this process. Of course taxes are based on land and building assessed cost. Montreal and suburbs chose to assess condos at a market rate and even higher, while to assess detached house way below the market and assess data centers below the costs it was recently resold.
> The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes.
E.g.,:
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt...
Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing.
Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
I can affirm that local fire departments are not spending resources preparing for data centre fires in any special way. However, I can attest a recently built DC used political means to dodge aspects of fire codes (mostly related to building road infrastructure for fire truck ingress).
Amazon also secured a 75% reduction in property taxes for 30 years.
Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room?
C02 fire suppression is rare in datacenters. That's more of an offshore thing in my experience (I design fire suppression systems for a living, and do life safety systems).
Typically server rooms are currently Fluoro-K / Novec123 if they have space constraints on the suppression systems. Those cylinders take up the least space per cubic foot of protected environments. These are less harmful than previous gasses like Halon, but still not good for the environment.
If you're lucky we get given ample room for cylinders and can go with Argon suppression systems, but that can take up more than 4 or 5 times the space alone and adds a lot of cost in engineering manifolds, etc.
CO2 takes up as much space as Argon systems and will kill someone who doesn't leave the hazard area before release so its generally not used in any datacenter project I've done.
Powerplant's at datacenters often use drychem systems instead or foam releasing systems.
That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster.
Yes, that’s exactly my impression. When regulations do exist they use political means to try to evade them for a 1% cost savings.
Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
> Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you.
Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR.
> Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby
I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere.
Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace.
> because someone failed to do PR
They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion.
I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices.
The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer.
What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve?
If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them?
Here’s how it works:
- New DCs are going up everywhere and it’s in the media how they use a lot of power and try to negotiate cheaper everything
- People’s utility bills keep going up, particularly the transmission etc components that can’t be avoided by just buying from a different supplier
- Power utilities say they have to increase rates due to increasing demand and regulation that requires them to serve new DCs
- I know multiple people who’ve had their power shut off and can’t afford it on an average salary
So when working stiffs making $25 an hour face a $650 power bill that was $325 three years ago… yeah, they’re going to consider DCs the culprit.
Add on top of that plenty of marketing about how AI will leave you unemployed.
> If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer
My understanding is this wasn't done.
> What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices?
The most understandable explanations I've heard had to do with grid upgrades. Crap the utility owns and controls and has to change to accomodate the new power flows.
More often, however, it looks like local and state government engaging in industrial policy by trying to get residents to subsidise the new datacenters.
Upgrades also take time and may not be a good idea seeing how the current AI buildout is financed. There is a certain amount of capacity right now and AI behemoths have the financial muscle to take what's there. If that leaves too little for everyone else, prices will reflect that as soon as existing contracts allow.
I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…)
Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are?
Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4].
The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.)
Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem.
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s
[3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
[4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta...
Thank you very much! Lots of reading to do today :3
The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things.
The problem is not that subtle, the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy. The former aren't very problematic, often pretty good neighbors even, while the latter are nightmare fuel and will purposely not be built to be quiet and safe and stay within available energy capacity and not deplete struggling water tables, and they have the financial and political clout behind them to get away with pretty much anything. Small wonder no one wants them anywhere near them. Traditional DCs might be able to not be a nuisance despite using evaporative cooling, but no one would build that anywhere where there is a shortage of water, and the amount of heat to be dissipated by such a DC is way smaller.
But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble.
Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties.
>the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy
So you're saying that all the rules and laws and best practices that HN has cheered for over the years that apply to new construction and new industry and claim to be about sustainability and environmental protections (among other things) didn't actually do what they were sold as being able to do?
Either the new ones are cleaner (I suspect they are but the difference is probably mostly on paper), or we all got lied to.
DC builders use political means to evade regulations almost every single time. So the regulations are in effect useless.
I have personally observed this with them getting exceptions to fire codes everyone else has to comply with.
I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs.
Nah, I back the Abundance movement and have voted for building new housing complexes in my town against groups who claimed it would ruin the character of our town to have a 60 acre plot near an old industrial center turned into neighborhoods.
Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building.
Right. A new DC will just be another brownfield in 20-30 years. We don’t need more of those.
New DCs should be built in Quebec next to hydro plants in places absolutely nobody lives. Or next to nuclear power plants.
Because people aren't motivated by facts. They make up lies to justify their opposition: "water usage". But when you disprove that superstition with facts and logic, their opinion on water usage doesn't change. Its like as if you had said nothing at all.
> I don't know what the right answer is.
Raise property taxes in the burbs significantly so they can pay for their own infrastructure instead of relying on being subsidized by the poorest people in the area.
Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall.
But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes.
If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method.
I found this article posted yesterday interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901
I am under the impression that they are building data centers in very rural areas where as you can see there is no issue of limited land.
Whether pollution is a significant concern there, I also doubt, unless they construct a coal plant to power it.
You’ve forgotten sales taxes and income taxes generated by shopping malls, which is a pretty big oversight. The square meters per employee is much lower for retail than for a data center. They’ve gotten quite good at keeping staffing low.
Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts.
A tax cut or PILOT vs vacant land in a small city with a shrinking tax base is still net positive tax increase.
If the options are 0 or 50% off some tax rate table, the 50% is still better than nothing.
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.
This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.
Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.
Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount.
Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate.
(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)
Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right?
Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right?
I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways
First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.
> Most of the lots are empty.
Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't?
> Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.
I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc?
I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice!
But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right?
Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction?
(in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?)
(Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better)
No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of it. CHI1 is ringed by a single two-sided line of spots. Every big box retailer is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt larger than CHI1 itself.
It amuses me that you have consistently refused to draw the connection to this 'ocean' of asphalt and the purpose of the building it was designed for and are basically being obtuse.
But you know what is a better neighbour than a data centre or an office or a strip mall? A nice public park and local shops that support the community without you having to drive your car a distance that in any other country would be easily walkable.
Why would anybody want a monolithic megastructure sat next to their house that offers nothing good to the community itself? There is no upside for the locals. No improvement to quality of life.
You know what's even better than a nice public park?
A hospital and a university. And if they don't generate taxes, they should fund a welfare program too.
That is what the discussion sounds like to me.
We turned from discussing whether data centers cause concrete issues to the point where authorities should intervene, to some sort of wish list for how data centers that are constructed far away from residents should provide great public benefits.
Feels like you’re cherry picking to make a point, so here’s some cherry picking on the other side https://www.fierce-network.com/data-center/top-10-ugliest-da...
So much dead ugly space, and let’s not look at them at night with enough external lighting to see from space (almost)
The data center might be more attractive but the office building provides more jobs and resources to the local community. You skipped that point in your reply. Even if most of the people working in the office building aren't from the area, those people are getting food and other services from local businesses. All that money goes to the local community and supports local businesses.
You'd take a featureless, opaque warehouse over a structure with windows and architecture that was intended to stand out? The asphalt doesn't have to be an eyesore if planned well, either. Copious vegetation woven throughout, painted teal or with murals instead of black, a policy of "after the following hours, locals are allowed to play roller-hockey and tennis here.", host regular farmer's markets, etc.
I'd love to see a Google Maps picture of a large, attractive parking lot.
Hasn't been done != can't be done.
Wait are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers
Do you think a community is your house
The office buildings next to the CyrusOne data centers in the western suburbs are not filled with people from Aurora. They're filled with commuters.
Do they not eat lunch? Or do any local shopping?
The literal foot traffic of office workers was a major reason brought up by cities trying to force companies to RTO post pandemic.
That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? The data centers? Also what does the specific building or set of buildings you hate in one town have to do with the concept of office buildings
I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.
>are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers
>Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.
Since neither are data centers, which aren’t filled with workers, you could’ve just said “yeah”
“Office buildings bring less to communities than data centers because of all the people that work in them” lmao
> That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work?
Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople.
These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office.
> These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day
While it is a shame that tptacek has to see “commuters“ going both ways it is good to know that the people of Aurora have this beautiful park
https://www.cyrusone.com/data-centers/north-america/aurora-i...
I don't know what you think this link shows, but you can just jump to CHI1 on Google Maps (or, you know, drive there) to see what that area looks like.
It shows another generic large semi-industrial/semi-commercial building with a fancy facade around the lobby/reception area and a big blocky rectangular warehouse-style building behind it, with a little mechanical area outside of it. For a moment I thought I was staring at a satellite photo of parts of south San Jose, Sunnyvale or Newark. I can't even begin to count how many of these I've seen in my life. And counter to your point about aesthetics of an office building, I have seen plenty of office buildings that have nice shaded and tree-covered parking lots that aren't wide expanses of asphalt, with pleasant outdoor areas, and architecture that might not be exquisite, but fits well with the time and place it exists in.
This is not true. Office buildings are non issue and also imply more shops, restaurants, cafes and generally walkable environment.
> nobody moralizes office buildings
I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?
Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.
I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.
Office buildings presumably are filled with bodies who get paid, who will spend some amount of money in the local economy.
I'm not sure data centers could make the same argument.
The agents will leave the data center and buy stuff from the local economy, didn’t you hear that?
I have lunch around the datacenters when I go to them.
The main point I think is density - for their size datacenters typically don't hire many people.
> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot.
Manhattan (or any downtown business district) has lots of office towers with little asphalt, and many (small) businesses that make their living from office workers. Perhaps you are biased towards car-centric design thinking?
Toronto (for one) has condo towers next to (or not far from) business towers so many folks can walk, cycle, or take transit as their commute. And this is not a new concept:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
Nobody? I do, and I've seen plenty others.
People have been talking about these issues for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Small_Urban...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Marohn
https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Delahanty
> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community
This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit.
I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods.
Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue.
No, this is backwards.
"Local businesses" are net money extractors. Local residents spend their money, a portion of which goes up the supply chain and out of the community.
Datacenters are net money injectors. Even if they provide relatively few jobs, or get tax breaks, they're still largely injecting capital that originates from outside the community.
>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate
The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)
The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape.
Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time.
Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity.
These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
> These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all.
Why not batteries?
> These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all.
They could be training a model or two for months.
They’re assuredly checkpointing, which is SOP for any long training. Lots of things can go wrong besides power loss.
If yout backup power is unreliable it could slow down your model release by days or weeks.
Sure. Reasonably reliable backup power is a very good thing, but losing power isn’t necessarily a catastrophe.
Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere.
So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure.
They are also universally saying that AI's benefits far outweigh the challenges and will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity, health, and human capability.
> will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity
Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness.
So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.
If you heard nothing about it, it would be because you did not make any effort to look for it.
It is central to both OpenAI's and Anthropic's stated mission and either CEO has been discussing this repeatedly.
Examples:
For OpenAI, we have here an "AI job transition framework": https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_...
Anthropic has "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"
https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10487271/
>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise
For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space
I'm skeptical that they're actually surrounded by American prairie. What are the addresses of some of the data centers you're talking about?
Edit: I just see traditional American landscaping surrounding the CyrusOne data center in Aurora. I don't really see any native forbs or native grasses and it has a bunch of trees... where's the prairie?
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.
Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.
The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.
A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems
It can be, but you missed the important point: these ones aren't.
You wouldn't be worried about constant noise from the chillers?
It seems like the biggest issue, related to energy usage, is noise from turbines, right? Doesn’t Illinois have nukes? Does that alleviate the burden?
Where in Aurora? I’m at the CME DC daily, and I am not aware of any prairie green spaces that aren’t being actively developed. In fact the area between Bilter and Butterfield Rds are so active it’s changing my commute time to the DC — making my 10 minute ride often more than 30. So as someone who visits Aurora data centers daily I’m not seeing it.
The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.
I don't understand his point either. I used to work off of Diehl Road not too far from the CyrusOne DC[1] and it is anything but a prairie. It has greenery, but it's just the usual fake landscaping that all the industrial parks in Aurora, Bolingbrook, Warrenville, etc. do.
And there's counterexamples to the desolate office space... the Ace Hardware corporate office[2] I think is remarkably pleasant.
[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rFgzVfWNBaGxpBNg7
[2]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5EiQy5YUPengwDE18
At this point you're basically making an argument against all commercial real estate.
Sure, and I think you won’t have to look too hard to find people who don’t want to live near commercial real estate. That is exactly the point.
Why should any of us have to put up with evil? Why do the poor bear that load more than the rich?
But also there’s no prairie around there. At all. What year were you last out there?
Plot a line from CHI1 to all of the nearest houses and get back to me with the the prices. I did one ray from CHI1 to Molitor Road and the first house I hit was over a half mil. Tell me more about the poor people these data centers inconvenience!
What do you mean, evil? Is there something evil about a datacenter, or a strip mall? I struggle to think what that could be.
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate.
This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers.
Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood.
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know?
> But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls
You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7.
Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.
No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything.
Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
Buddy I am writing this from that parking lot and I can hear quite a bit. I call bullshit. And suggest a hearing test, for real if you’re a DCO person get it checked on the regular.
Respectfully, I've done this recently and I don't believe you, but I'd be happy to place a bet with you and then drive out there and take decibel readings (I can go grab some hardwood at Owl to justify the trip).
You are confusing construction of data centers with their normal operation.
Data centers are silent in normal operation. It's the construction you're hearing about that is noisy, but that goes for any construction.
This is plainly wrong considering many people's complaints about the ridiculous amount of noise these things spew out. The whiring of gas turbines and cooling systems of complete, fully operational, data centres has nothing to do with construction.
Again, this isn't unknowable, you can literally just pull up next to CHI1 and open your window and listen. You won't hear anything.
I'd rather have a DC as my neighbor than an office because what are offices full of? People like you who call the next guy's stuff an eyesore.
> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
As modern datacenters go, 69,000 sq ft for a whole facility is REALLY small. Only some portion of that 69k is going to be actual conditioned space once you subtract all the ancillary services, things like security office, staging area, bathrooms, electrical breaker panel rooms, etc. It's almost like boutique/niche sized compared to the things that are going up in Texas, Indiana, a few other places. I know people building hyperscale size stuff that would almost call 69k sq ft hobby sized.
The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
> the user instead of in big centralized facilities
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you need to build and power n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, and even then without all of the more efficient power, batching, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
That's working under the (imo wrong) assumption that LLMs are what we need/want. First, because pushing toward the user can happen as shared hosting in your municipality and doesn't have to be in every home. Second, because if you take slop, adtech, and surveillance out of the equation, the material impact is several orders of magnitude less than what's being built today. Or for what it's worth, several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
> shared hosting in your municipality
Wouldn't that be even worse in terms of NIMBYism?
1. Every single municipality would have AI data center "hosting in your municipality".
2. You'd have to majorly overbuild every municipality's capacity, as usage would likely have peak hours and 'dead' hours each day based on work, sleep, etc. if usage is local to that municipality.
> several orders of magnitude less than what's already built in terms of DC capacity.
Are you saying you believe already-built data centers are 100 times (2 orders of magnitude) as much as needed? I presume this is not what you think will actually happen in the real world though?
1. In the scenario i'm mentioning, there's no LLMs being deployed at all for end users. Social networks, netflix-style video and email fits in a single rack for thousands of people (tens of thousands?).
2. Yes. That's already the case. Today a single smartphone has enough CPU/RAM to host email services for many thousands of users. A single Netflix OCA 2U serves 400Gbit/s of video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738
The only reason we had huge DCs before LLMs was so Google/Facebook could spread their surveillance/adtech empire. Nothing of that scale is needed to provide useful services to end users.
Framasoft, the biggest non-profit host (a french FLOSS/education NGO) serves millions of users with dozens of services on 68 servers and 800TB storage: https://framapiaf.org/@Framasoft/115767718097945194
It’s going to the high frontier. Orbital/lunar. It’s too important not to harden.
This is an investor scam and not a real proposal.
We've "imported" this concern to the UK too, largely driven by the same issues seemingly whipped up by US lack of regulation much more than local examples (that's not to say there have been no cases of bad buildouts here).
Many of the people now extremely opposed to data centres seem to believe the UK didn't have any data centres recently, never mind that you can pass by data centres in e.g. London Docklands and mistake it for an office building. In some cases they are in a subset of floors of office buildings.
I'm all for regulating them so they need to account for externalities, but the blind opposition to them is frustrating, not least because it means there's no pressure to deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects.
The power supply issue is very real, though. UK has expensive electricity and high-megawattage data centers are obviously not going to help with that.
(The water issue doesn't pass the smell test for me because I expected data centers to be closed loop, but if it does apply? London is currently on a hosepipe ban!)
Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.
The power supply concern is real, but it's also "just" a regulatory issue. The UK has some expectations of paying for impact on the upstream power network, but the requirements are not nearly sufficient to deal with a massive increased demand.
Fixing regulations for that to require demonstrating commercial arrangements to fund additional supply to mitigate cost would address that, however, and that'd be a broader social good: Start out with the assumption that anything energy intensive must cover its externalities. Then you can selectively drop those requirements for things you consider sufficiently beneficial to justify socialising the cost.
More general-purpose regulations would be better, but local authorities can already to a large extend address this as part of the process of granting (or not) planning permission.
Regarding the water issue, it is real in places where it is insufficiently regulated - it's cheaper to dump the water many places. But it absolutely can be closed loop, and you can get district heating out of it. You just need to make the demands.
> Let's not forget that some of this is a proxy issue for the downstream impacts of AI, spam, job destruction, community disruption, etc.
Absolutely. But I also think that peoples real concerns will get harmed from going after data centres with arguments that are easy to dismiss instead of directing the criticism against the real issues.
> deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects
Two counterpoints:
- the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
- for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
> - the problem is not in "regulatory" gaps, but in how regulations are actually applied; regulation is usually good for protecting the environment and the neighbors... the question is more why regulations never apply to billionaires? to politicians' friends?
It may be in both, but there certainly are gaps in regulation as well. E.g. a new concern here is the effect on energy prices, where regulation to force large data centre projects to fund sufficient improvements to energy infrastructure would address it. But sure, it won't help if the regulations aren't enforced. That's seemingly a bigger concern in the US than in the UK.
E.g. we have at least two projects in London alone where waste heat from data centres will be fed into district heating loops. Using the planning process as a means to mitigate concerns with these projects works when the will is there and the regulations allow for it.
> - for any "gap" that you'd like addressed, how do you see yourself tilting the balance of power if not with a strong opposition? do you think people in power care at all about a mildly-displeased middle class citizen who'd like to amend a text? no, they only care about an angry mob and then might try to make concessions
The point is that if the angry mob points at X while the problem is Y, the angry mob isn't likely to get anything resolved even if/when politicians are sympathetic. If anything else, if your cynical about politicians: If a mob is focused on the wrong target, how likely do you think it is that a politician will try to find a way to take advantage of that rather than patiently explaining why they're focused on the wrong issue?
The problem is not more data centres. The problem is noise, water, energy. That problem is both not unique to data centres, and also not something that is an issue with all data centre projects. The right way of addressing that is to ensure that externalities are addressed and mitigation paid for irrespective of what gets built.
> this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over
I wonder if these "classic projects" have been morphing into jet engine projects as energy use vs energy available have changed.
personally datacenters have affected you and me: ssds, hard disks and memory are super expensive; electricity costs have gone up
Maybe, but "this would probably have been fine five years ago" is not a very reassuring standard. The physical impact matters more than whether the racks are running email servers or training models.
A traditional colo DC isn't running super power dense GPUs and doesn't use water cooling. These exist in whatever city you live in and no one knows where they are because there is no impact. They are completely different beasts.
They're not going to run email servers. They will run AI.
Is there a need? Or a want?
I think this general situation has been on peoples' minds since Erin Bronkovich. Gosh that movie came out 26 years ago.
> There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).
Even the traditional DC companies are going all-in on AI.
"Won't somebody think of the poor non-AI datacenters?"
... said nobody, until now
Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?
>Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space
Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point
Correct, it was absorbed by crypto bros. And now many of them are attempting to offload to AI. Ban crypto datacenters and there’s plenty of additional capacity available. There’s a reason China did almost a decade ago now.
Virtualization uses standard rack mount servers, crypto does not. The machinery they use are completely different.
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws. I would personally vote against polticians who enacted those kinds of regulations; and if they passed anyway I would attempt to mine and use cryptocurrency in ways that circumvented the regulations banning me from doing so.
>> The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws.
Thats exactly correct. The killer app for crypto is criminal enterprise. Yes there are other niches, but nothing that would sustain the industry.
Passing a regulation regarding mining would be difficult to enforce. It's impossible to know what a GPU inside the data center is doing.
At this point the industry is legit, even promoted by individuals in govt (who overtly sell access (cough bribe) using it. So no, you don't need to worry, there's no risk of regulations like this anywhere soon.
> and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis
By bringing jobs to a struggling city in their industrial district?
> That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana
You can't without making an effort to reduce your dependence on it. The most anti DC people I see are chronically online blasting their shit all over social media. Typically influencers, who make a living using said DCs, all day long. Social media directly supports what they are against. There are other ways to spread your message and when they choose the one method that directly goes against the message they are trying to put out, I'm not going to take them seriously, and will also assume they don't know what they're talking about.
The most anti DC people are not chronically online, if at all. Just because Youtube influencers exist doesn't mean they're anything close to the average concerned citizen.
See also, how many people here in France were jailed for sabotaging 5G antennas during their buildout.
Not using AI is already making you 0% dependent on these particular DCs that are shoddily built with no regard for the people around them.
These new datacenters aren’t for powering social media. All this extra capacity is for slop generators actively making the world worse.
> You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system.
I see very little advocating for change and a whole lot of knee-jerk reactions to shut it down.
The data center protests near me tried to complain about noise as one of their points, even though the DC was in the middle of nowhere
Other AI DCs can be heard from over a kilometer away.
This data center site was so far away they had to organize bus transport to the area.
Nobody was going to hear it unless they drove to it for the purposes of hearing it.
So what? It's good to have people question the status quo. Shut the stupid AI craze down before it finishes destroying whatever's left of our planet.
Or are you not concerned that AI companies are now the n°1 fossil fuel lobbyists in EU/USA? That they are consuming insane amounts of concrete and electricity for 0 gains for citizens (but enormous gains for the elites)?
> Shut the stupid AI craze down before it finishes destroying whatever's left of our planet.
I think a lot of the protestors are using data center protests as a proxy for some other belief like this. They think slowing down a data center is going to stop the future from occurring, which is an illogical fantasy on many different levels.
I like having my garbage picked up at the curb, but I wouldn't want to live downwind from a landfill.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
I think that’s how DCs mark an exponential growth in NIMBYism and its acceptance - we’re already seeing city-wide, county-wide, even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density. If this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted, I expect to see similar broader bans against multi-family housing, mass-transit, etc.
Based on what? Slippery slope fallacy? There are real reasons why people don’t want their community to have a DC, which are wildly different than the entitled NIMBYism that isn’t against multi-family housing and mass transit.
Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
> which are wildly different
Many of the same reasons used against dense housing, mass transit, and solar/wind turbines are used against DCs -
such as claims:
* That it would be too much for the existing grid to handle
* That it would be too much for existing other utilities to handle
* That it would be too close to x other thing (zoo, etc)
* Some say it won't be visually appealing
* That it would change the nature of the existing area
* That there isn't enough groundwater
* etc.
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
Wouldn't the complaints then be that a DC there would spoil the area's natural beauty (and would be too much for the electric grid there, etc)? Or if the DC were located similarly to how this one is, there would be the same complaints as OP case - see the photo at the very top of the OP article - it shows a very low-density area. If someone was expecting to see urban-type density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
>> even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
> Put a data center in Atherton and I’ll change my mind.
1. You say you would change your mind in that particular place, but are you arguing that others wouldn't NIMBY against Atherton if one were proposed there? Everyone has different ideas about where they believe should be NIMBYd, including because people have different 'backyards'? And I presume your 'backyard' is tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles from the OP DC location?
2. With state-level bans already existing in states where much of the state is very low-density, the evidence seems to show the opposite of your claim that if a very low-density area were picked then it wouldn't face a ban.
>we’re already seeing city-wide, county-wide, even state-wide bans, even in states where much of the state is very low density
Are we actually though? I bet you heard about the Maine datacenter moratorium that passed our state legislature. It generated tons of conversation here on HN.
Did you also hear that our Democrat governor vetoed it, and it did not become law?
How many of these moratoriums are actually getting into the law?
New York also enacted a moratorium, and in recent days Texas stopped any new data center from being connected to the grid (the Texas one was done through the governor’s power over the grid).
The Internet we are talking on didn't require the current unsustainable data center build-out. This is like saying that people complain about companies dumping toxic waste when they themselves poop. Scale matters.
Oh come on. 95% of new data centers are obviously for LLMs not communications
"You criticize society, yet you participate in it. How curious."
If anyone is curious, from the photograph in the article, I have geolocated the existing business park property here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kYyHuEWcAZkrypWa7
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
I work in commercial real and even I'm going to go NIMBY mode on this lol. This property shares a large boundary to the zoo and I have a very hard time believing you won't cause an impact (noise pollution eg) to the animals next door.
Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.
IMO noise pollution is the easiest one to solve: just put all the AC fans on the far side of the datacenter. If not enough, surround with noise absorbing panels. If not enough, just get a different fan design, more coolers, and run them at half speed. They can even afford Noctua :)
I bet nearby rail yard produces way more loud noises.
Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.
Can noise that can be heard a kilometer away really not be heard from the other side of a building?
Noise absorbing panels block airflow, if you didn't know that. Useless for AC.
You don't need to block the airway. Air and sound move differently, so you absorb on paths that sounds likes to travel and minimize obstruction on the air path. Something akin to a Tesla valve.
I'm willing to bet that you can make the exhaust noise near inaudible if you want to. Problem is, it costs a couple 10k dollars or so, and why pay for that if you can just fuck over the neighbour instead?
Tesla valve noise cancellers are not a thing that exists. Why don't you go and invent them before telling the rest of us we should just buy them for $200 each?
The Potential of Tesla Valve Design on Acoustic Application https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-96-5063-7_...
Analysis of sound performance on Tesla valve principle-based model: Experimental and simulation approach https://doaj.org/article/8cfc59ce5f59454e856e5b2fb613372a
:P
But I think even with just a basic understanding of physics its clear that something like this could work. It also does not have to be a Tesla valve precisely. There are all kinds of mufflers and some of them can no doubt be applied at industrial scale - if one is willing to pay a reasonable amount of money.
> Datacenter is like the cleanest and most ecofriendly business you can imagine.
Tell that to the residents of Memphis.
As I understand, initially, the power production was done on-site using gas turbines. Later, these were moved to Mississippi and a high voltage powerline connected the two sites. After this change, why is the Memphis data center not clean and ecofriendly for residents of Memphis?
Later is just as likely to never happen, as happen. Billionaires have promised all sorts of things to get tax breaks for the things they want and never followed through with the parts that benefited others.
You moved the goalpost. You said they are clean as could be. While temporary, sure, it was a horrific situation for the nearby residents.
Anything can be done so rushed and shitty that it has negative consequences.
Nothing that uses as much power as a modern data center is anywhere close to the most clean eco friendly business imaginable. Even one on 100% renewables, which most very much are not, is hurting the environment far more than many industries. Green energy isn't "free", it's just less harmful than the alternatives.
Ok, what large business would you say is more eco friendly?
A fun story, for electric generation, Washington state produces and exports a lot of electricity because they are blessed with convenient hydropower. But WA still don't want to build data centers for some reason, even though they a the best positioned to.
Messing with the zoo was a really bad idea - it is extremely popular, has higher attendance than professional sports in our market, and Nashville is full of celebrities who immediately hit their socials to condemn it.
There is lots of land outside the city but then you can't piggyback on infrastructure so it is more expensive. That's my primary objection - if this is so important why not spend the money to put it somewhere it is likely to have less of an impact on your neighbors?
This is more a harbinger of what is about to happen all over the country. So the specifics matter less than it marking the political ascendancy of the backlash to AI / data centers / big tech / billionaires...
> Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels?
Can they break those promises easily?
Sure, you can sue, but while those suits move through courts, everyone else suffers.
One of the guys leading the effort is active on threads (probably twitter too). He has no interest in negotiating. He is gloating over his win hardcore and has very absolutist views when it comes to datacenters
Hat tip for the additional source. I have no love for people in this fight looking for a "total win/defeat". It is a dumb way to approach large construction projects. Can you share some links to the Threads account?
Here's one account, @rooey.wav
https://www.threads.com/share/BAQzYUI7Nf/
There's another account that I thought was something like @stopdatacenters but I'm having trouble finding it atm
Once you get audience captured on a single topic like that, you are damned to being the biggest champion of it forever.
Happened to lots of influencers during the whole vax debacle of COVID. Mostly sane people who didn't catch a big break until they mentioned there might be mercury in the covid vax. Five years later and they are still tugging those lines.
What I think is nice is that the political parties opposed to data center development are actually taking concrete steps, exercising specific powers, to advance their goals.
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
If the city thinks data centers are incompatible with certain areas, it should encode that through zoning, permitting, utility pricing, noise limits, etc.
We have those but data centers keep skirting them. Data center developers often classify their properties as "light industrial" or "warehouse" to bypass regulation. These lobbyists are also big enough to push state legislation that strips local towns and counties of land-use authority.
Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound
Sounds like a good opportunity to update the rules on noise pollution then.
Probably zoning and anti-corruption laws too. That's why I think moratoriums like what Maine did are incredibly important. We should take our time and make sure things are done right. Pro-data center people who oppose those things are digging their own graves
FTA:
> In late July, the Metro Council approved new zoning and related restrictions on data center development and implemented a moratorium on new permit approvals to run through Dec. 1.
I feel like that is besides the point. I think the fact that ended up this way is an illustration how hardened the public has become. There's no niceties, procedure. The public has been pushed well past that point. This is not a negotiation.
Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.
Eminent domain is almost always used to make corporations richer. In other parts of the country, eminent domain is being used to seize people's homes to build AI DCs.
Corporations are the money engines of the government.
I don't know of any other way the government makes money other than riding on the back of corporations.
So yes, from the governments POV, using eminent domain to make corporations richer also has the direct effect of making the government richer.
Just think about it a little bit.
Over 80% of the federal government's revenue comes from individuals (income tax, payroll tax).
On the other hand, I guess the vast majority of politician incomes come from corporations.
And where does that income tax/payroll tax money come from?
~45% of people work for companies of less than 500 people, ~12% for the govrnment (federal, state, local), ~6% are self employed. That leaves less than a half for all the companies >500, and only a tiny minority of them have an outsized influence on politics.
EDIT: Also, if there were no big corporations, people would still work and pay taxes. No sane statesman would purposefully build their countries economy on non-state-controlled megacorps.
No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.
It's kind of strange how the state ("of, by, and for the people") and corporations (comprised of people) are such distinct entities with their own interests. The fact that the state and corporations can and do collude in opposition to the public good is at the heart of so many enormous problems.
It feels like this is the first time I've seen the political system move in tune with the public mood in regards to AI and this is public anger finding expression in public policy.
> will over the individuals desire.
If you believe corporations are people.
Even billionaires really don't operate as individuals, they are a monster that we've let grow to have unchecked power across the entire federal government.
(note, I may be agreeing with what you're saying I just don't agree with the framing of the "individual") Most of the pushback belongs against the entities that are more powerful than even the federal government at times.)
I live in Nashville. This story is all over the place in general. People assume all the things like it will make their rates go up, etc.
I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.
It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.
Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.
But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).
Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.
I spent most of my IBEW apprenticeship working in data centers of all sizes (5-300,000 sqft), and micro co-location facilities (like DCb's) are entirely different from the likes of the AWSes and cryptomining operations of this world (250,000sqft+).
Happy for the zoo exhibits/animals, but this particular co-lo wasn't even among the egregious data center owners.
----
My recommendation to data center planners: small cities have cheaper land, and lots of love/power/cronyism. You may get further by buddying up with the smaller fishes/communities.
> Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.
When a new DC is being proposed, how do you tell - for sure - whether it'll be quiet and discreet, vs. loud and noisy?
Agreed and disagreed. It is a terrible precedent for sure. On the other hand, government inaction, usually hiding behind arcane codes, process, and blame circles gets really frustrating. In that world, they'd still be waiting on a court date(if even) when the data center cuts its ribbon.
It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.
This sounds like one of those cases where the opposition may be right about the project and still wrong about the mechanism
Same city:
>The 60,000-seat stadium is projected to cost $2.1 billion, including $1.26 billion of public money—the largest stadium subsidy in U.S. history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Stadium_(2027)
Nashville politics operate in an extremely narrow window.
The local government has a degree of autonomy, but there are unspoken checks on it by a generally hostile state government. Nashville is represented by Democrats while the state is controlled by Republicans. There is an implicit threat that if the city fails to pursue the state's objectives the state will punish it.
Recently the city angered the state because it refused to hold the Republican convention. The state retaliated by passing a law to shrink the Nashville city council and another to take control of its airport. The state also took control of the Nashville tourism board that has a slush fund paid for by city taxes.
There is a direct line between state reps and local politicians. So for example when state lobbyists were angered at the loss of parking due to a bike lane they called up a council member to have the lane removed.
Which is all to say that the stadium deal was ordered by the state and not something the city had a real say in.
If the datacenter people go and cozy up to the governor or legislators the state will lean on the city again and they will ram it through as well.
Amazing that the new stadium has less capacity too
They want it to look more full because no one likes watching the Titans suck wind year after year, so the old stadium was laughably empty when the cameras panned over the stands.
I'm not joking. This is the reason I heard for them making it smaller.
Stadiums actually provide utility to the local community
We’ve been building data centers for many decades without problems. I used to service equipment at some in my area. Many had big chunks of green space around them, very desirable to live near.
The current climate around seems very sudden.
You can't think of a single new development in the situation?
Sorry to be snide - you can certainly make an argument that the demands of AI should not affect public perception of data centers, but you should simply make that argument, rather than mysteriously omitting any reference to the issue.
Yes, I can, it doesn’t change my observation.
> The current climate around seems very sudden.
Is it?
Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.
AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.
Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.
Yes.
I get the background story but the response to a very specific thing seems sudden regardless.
There is a medical office building near my house along my walking route. It has a fancy, detached, fully enclosed generator building. When the generators are running the place emits a really high-pitched whine.
I can hear it approaching from a couple blocks away. I'm sure my dog and other animals hear it much better than me.
> high-pitched whine.
Does it have to?
I meant, it is a very common problem with lots of complain. I bet modern electronic can do it much less noise.
Does HN know something in this area?
My sincere theory is that this is finally the government/politics stepping in to take their cut from the AI revolution. The politicians now have a fee-based strategy where they can literally just stick a fee on any upcoming project(s). Pay up if you ever want your permits to go through and construction to get started.
It is probably not that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 posted yesterday explains it well.
You don't need a conspiracy theory. All these data centers were going up in rural/near rural areas that voted for this, but then the data centers made everyone else's electric bills go up.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
> I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
Exactly my sentiment. I don't even understand how this is controversial. The only ones who don't seem to get it are everyone making the plans (including the folks in government)
They're just trying to reduce the risk and lead time to gain an advantage. I'm a huge AI supporter and there's no way to advocate for them. They've just blown all the good will out of the water.
While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power
> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
The value prop for the crazy sounding idea of putting GPUs into orbit.
They did it because people didn't want a data center next to the zoo. There was a huge backlash against it, and the locals are very happy that they were listened to, I can promise you. No conspiracy theory necessary.
This doesn't sound like the proper use of eminent domain to me.
Way better than all the other uses though.
Right, it's supposed to be used to take people's homes. /s
I understand location is important for web/traditional data centers but why do they put these AI centers so close to people? Could they not put them somewhere far away like maybe in the middle some Nebraska farmland where it's just miles and miles of corn everywhere or the desert? I guess water would be an issue but it's closed loop no? Couldn't they just truck in the water and re use it or something?
I think it's ironic that we have no problem putting DCs next to a prison but god forbid we put them next to a zoo which is the same thing but for animals.
Don’t forget the horrible water usage of data centers! But don’t ask me how much water animal agriculture uses.
People love to pretend to care about animals.
Prison is where we put people who have broken laws. A zoo is primarily where we put animals who are incapable of surviving in the wild.
It is also a place where the next generation can learn the wonder and beauty of nature.
They also tend to work closely with conservation efforts worldwide.
So... yeahhh, no. Not at all the same.
You're saying it's ok to torture humans with something that's unacceptable for zoo animals provided they broke some laws. That's the part I'm taking issue with.
It blows my mind that (my fellow) Americans are so averse to taxation that they don't even consider that option. Whether you're worried about jobs or faraway tech elites or resource usage....just go straight to the source and use freaking taxes. Blocking is so pointless. All this political will could be a huge opportunity for these locales but instead it's petulant obstructionism.
The Millenium Scholarship program in Nevada paid for tons of kids' education by taxing casinos. It's not perfect but it's channeling economic activity to the people.
Why would the data center operators pay extra taxes to your city when they can just build them somewhere else that gives them a tax break instead?
But that's the right lever!
That gives the local voting population the ability to decide how much they're willing to put up with data centres. And a state that has excess water and electricity can have tax breaks and then that's where more data centres go.
I don't understand what you're trying to say - you're describing a win-win.
Pay the citizens the price, or don't burden them in the first place. There are two options, and the data center builders may pick either.
Big Tech has accumulated too many grievances across too many segments of society and made too much money in the process, so let's not act surprised at a backlash. And data centers are remarkably well-suited as a focal point for people to express those accumulated grievances. So I wouldn't look too hard at all the many and varied reasons that data centers are being opposed, but instead at the quickness and ferocity and consistency with which they are being opposed. It reminds of the movement in the US and Canada in the 90's to oppose unfettered globalization - though this already feels larger and more widespread (and less late to the party).
this is why space ai datacenter will scale faster than people expect
49198684 | Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo | https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/08/04/metro-council-data-ce... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49198684
More sources
1785853372 | Metro Council approved efforts to use eminent domain | https://www.wkrn.com/video/metro-council-approved-efforts-to...
1785900180 | Metro Nashville Council Marathon | https://www.wsmv.com/video/2026/08/05/metro-nashville-counci...
1785912178 | Metro Council approves eminent domain to buy proposed data center land near Nashville Zoo | https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/zoo-council-v...
1785922740 | Metro Council approves eminent domain legislation for Nashville Zoo data center | https://www.wsmv.com/2026/08/05/metro-council-approves-emine...
1785929744 | Metro Council approved efforts to use eminent domain | https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/metro-council-approved-eff...
1785933000 | Council OKs eminent domain action for proposed zoo-area data center site | https://www.nashvillepost.com/politics/council-oks-eminent-d...
1785936000 | Council OKs Eminent Domain Action for Proposed Zoo-Area Data Center Site | https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/metro-coun...
1785938700 | Nashville Council passes mayor's bid to acquire zoo-adjacent property | https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2026/08...
1785942026 | Metro Council approves eminent domain to acquire land near Nashville Zoo from data center company | https://www.newschannel5.com/videos/news/metro-council-appro...
1785949424 | Metro advances eminent domain effort to try to block DC BLOX data center | https://wpln.org/post/metro-advances-eminent-domain-effort-t...
1785953564 | Moving forward with eminent domain may mean proposed data center 'unlikely' Metro Councilman says | https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/eminent-doman...
1785957300 | Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo | https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2026/08/05/counci...
1785963278 | Metro Council approves eminent domain to acquire land near Nashville Zoo from data center company | https://www.newschannel5.com/news/metro-council-approves-emi...
1786017061 | Council approves O'Connell's eminent domain plan | https://www.axios.com/local/nashville/2026/08/06/council-app...
1786022777 | Council approves O'Connell's eminent domain plan | https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/policy/nashville-...
What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
https://www.nashville.gov/departments/council
This isn't true?
San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee
I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
The craziest thing about Metro Nashville (the city/county entity we are discussing) is that the wealthiest enclaves (independent cities) voted to retain certain city-powers (because of course they did!) – mostly Southern Davidson County, as you approach WilCo/Franklin.
> [T]he nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
>this isn't a city or a county
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
Coming from the state of Virginia, I might say that they're a perfectly standard way to govern.
VA independent cities aren't that, though. They're what they say on the tin: Cities without a county, they're not a nominal county and city both existing on paper but governed as one
Perhaps not from Neptune, but they don't exist in any of the 3 states I have lived in - so I was surprised.
Yes, Nashville has a huge number of council members, and it's much better that way. I moved from there to Seattle, and there's 9 council members (7 districts + 2 city-wide) here so we share a representative with a huge area (six times the people and two and a half times the land) and our local concerns have no voice.
I wonder if we're heading toward a split where "AI data centers" and traditional cloud infrastructure are treated as completely different categories. Five years ago, a new data center mostly meant more capacity for the internet. Today, many communities seem to assume it means tens of thousands of GPUs, massive power demand, noise, and water usage. AI has clearly changed public perception, but I'm curious how much of the opposition is actually new versus concerns that already existed around land use, noise, and power. For people who work in infrastructure, has the approval process genuinely become harder because of AI, or has AI mainly amplified concerns that were already there?
The real issue seems to be that local zoning and utility planning never caught up with the scale of modern data centers. If a project can consume huge amounts of power, generate constant noise, affect a neighboring zoo, those costs should be addressed before the land is sold and hundreds of millions are committed.
I’m surprised that there is no discussion here about the practice of using NDAs to bypass / prevent residents of local communities from learning about data centers about to be built or being able to provide any kind of input via the democratic process before it’s too late and construction has already started.
People are royally pissed off by the sheer arrogance of these data center people and Silicon Valley assholes who think they can just impose their will on places.
This is an incredible amount of hysteria over a tiny data center. Genuine pizzagate levels of epistemics here.
That's not as great example as you think it is.
Pizzagate is a false conspiracy theory driven entirely by outrage culture perpetuating falsehoods and online hysteria. What's the disconnect in their example?
Those would be great epistemics
Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
It's a religious belief that we're going to invent a machine god and our machine god will fight china's machine god.
One that just happens to be very convenient for the machine-god peddling billionaires.
I don't think OP mentioned a machine god?
Go ahead and go live next to one then and show us how it's nothing but propaganda.
Quite convenient how the same people trying to run roughshod over the others to get these bubble mania mausoleums built NEVER live near them but are HAPPY to make others who can't afford a second home live next to them.
>the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
Really? You think the American way of life today is comparable to 1821?
You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].
The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].
Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_dynasty 2. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...
>You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk.
If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want to live in Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon's Borg cube you're in for a few rough decades, on both sides of the political spectrum that is.
I don't understand how the abundance of AI datacenters translates into wellbeing of common folk. Right now AI is a net negative for the people.
In speaking with non-technical friends who are anti-data centers, I get the impression that they only recently discovered what a data center even was and are oblivious to how much they use data centers in their daily lives outside of AI.
But I don’t fault them even if they’re misinformed. AI is a big power grab by the wealthy and people feel helpless and are acting in the only way they think they can.
Regardless of a datacenter being for AI or not, NIMBY applies to everyone. I look forward to these totally probable datacenters in space.
NIMBYs are the reason San Francisco doesn't have massive freeways splitting through the center of it. Sometimes NIMBYs get things right
Didn't the Loma Prieta earthquake do that?
No it was the Freeway Revolt
I don't know that those timelines make sense; there were highways going through San Francisco... until the Loma Prieta earthquake; and then suddenly not. A cursory look at what Freeway Revolt was, seems to point to a movement in the 1950-1960's, rather than the early 1990's.