A lot of people here are portraying the opposition to data centers as being uneducated hypocrites who are against anything getting built. When you look at what the opposition are saying, they generally know what they are talking about. Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.
Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...
> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
Seeing multiple data centers sprouting up all over rural Ohio on a recent drive across the state was quite jarring. All of a sudden there are like ten massive cranes and a dozen huge turbines sitting in the middle of a field of corn and soy. It may me understand a lot better why people in the area hate them.
I like a lot of what El-Sayed has said about AI, but he's kind of disingenuous here. If you add enough rules like that, nothing's ever going to get build.
> isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them
More "Not in any backyard until deal structures are guaranteed to respect the gross asymmetry of participants, but at that point reasonable so let's establish those structure guarantees with federal leverage sooner than later"
In other words, welcome to NIABUDSAGTTYGAOP, BATPESLETSGWFLSTL
But I get how that's not as fun to engage with for pithy internet rhetoric.
“Nono, I’m not NIMBY, I just want to set up some goalposts that I can arbitrarily move whenever I want. I just want veto power. Trust me, I’ll use it responsibly”
Kevin Oleary's data center is going to be built one hour from my town. A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center. Here's what I hear and my response:
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.
They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid. We're currently building a nuclear reactor in my county as well. This is economic growth and a good thing. My town is dying. Main street is depressing. There's a general lack of optimism in the people here.
Did you know that global average temperatures are the highest they've been in 125,000 years, and temperatures are rising more than 20x faster than natural rates of global warming. Also the oceans are 30% more acidic, and the world's land ice is melting at a rate of like 660 billion tons per year. There's probably around 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere because warmer air holds more moisture and warmer water evaporates more quickly. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Etc etc
Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)
...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
This is exactly the argument people are worried about. "If prices go up, it's a good thing." For whom? Residents will have to pay this for a decade before a nuclear reactor comes online.
If that new economic activity has lopsided benefits and will never pay off for those negatively impacted by those price increases, then yeah shut it down or regulate it so that the benefits are shared equally by all. Shorter version, if the new economic activity is exploitive of people and their communities, then shut it down hard.
That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day for the sake of shareholder value.
> That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day
Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.
> for the sake of shareholder value
This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.
> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
No they aren't
They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit
They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.
The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.
If I get a vote about new economic activity, and it makes me personally poorer, I'm going to need a very good argument as to why I should permit it. Or, you know, pay me.
If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.
If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!
And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.
Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.
If we brought them up a decade earlier we wouldn’t have had to wait. Instead, we were told “renewables can replace fossil fuels”, despite us lacking the battery capacity to make them viable for the grid. Nuclear is a direct replacement for fossil fuels with better energy generation and actual on-demand capabilities, plus it’s far safer than fossil fuel-backed media will admit. We could have been using both and have completely cut down on emissions while also increasing the lifetime of our nuclear stores.
For that little old retired lady who is on a fixed income, of course! It means she'll have to sell that cute little house of hers and let someone turn it into an AirBnB and make some actual money from it.
It sounds like your town needs a monorail! Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity.
Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.
> This is economic growth and a good thing.
Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.
Using electricity is not breaking anything. "If I sell all my widgets, it's actually a good thing because I'll have to hire more people and manufacture more widgets" is entirely coherent.
Using electricity to the point that the grid cannot accommodate it is indeed breaking something that was working before, and the data center folks are surely not going to be the only ones paying for the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate it.
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
Data centers and almost all big companies don’t bring in any taxes. They negotiate zero property taxes for 30 years and have govts pay them money, because they say the half dozen people they employ are going to create a boom in the economy, they will buy houses, eat out, go to bars and this will create money for the local govt and property taxes.
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.
And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.
I was with you for a while here but you say nobody has an argument, then when someone presents one you say that actually that bad thing is a good thing because we'll react to the bad thing in a good way.
Gosh I sure am glad natural gas isn't a major fuel for grid-based generation, and under contention with residential heating. If that were the case, all that extra demand on a limited resource could drive prices up.
Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.
A nearby town was doing pretty well. Then suddenly on a ton of visible land were built either RV/boat storage places or u-store places. The town feels aweful. Lots of those people able to are moving away because the town just feels bad now. That one move dramatically changed that towns direction/future forever.
Nuclear plants take over a decade to build. Data centers take a few months or years. New nuclear isn't going to power any data centers for a long, long time.
We are also building a nuclear power plant in the county. I'm excited for the growth that's going to bring. The other reply to this comment is uneducated. Nuclear is incredibly safe.
Maybe these companies can't prevent their own bots from escaping containment and breaching others' systems, but nuclear is surely easier -- and if there's any issue, superintelligence can mitigate the damage.
By the time any of these nuclear plants come online, The current deferred tech debt apocalypse will have played out. The market is efficient, but the efficiency is very weak. This is no exception.
These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.
There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.
I hear that a lot and I'm happy with my county for making sure we get a good deal out of this. I think a lot of people are informed by the few bad cases and think that all DCs are going to do this.
My concern is that so much of what is going on with data centers in general ( and from what I have read, this one also ) is everything that is kept private from the communities. People need to stop acting like the people are not part of the government and don't have a say. We may elect representation, but we are still in charge.
I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"
Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.
Thank you for being one of the few thoughtful responses. I do feel like people's opinions here are more a position on AI in general than this data center. I come from a stance of, "this is happening so we might as well benefit from it"
Well yes. If a car window gets broken in your town, well that's a simple crime. But if entire parking lots full of cars get their windows broken out that's a crime spree and resources need setup in dealing with it.
The issue with incremental problems and quantity problems is you can't point at a single one and go "here, here is the problem" (at least most of the time), you have to look at the entire problem and go "Shit, the paperclip maximizer building one paperclip isn't an issue, it's turning everything into paperclips that's the issue".
What about emissions from the generation of this power in salt lake valley? I believe a big argument was the valley with its inversions and geographical layout makes that pollution much worse for people who live in it.
This DC will be probably a 3 hour drive from the Salt Lake valley. We're building a nuclear power plant as well which is going to help with pollution.
Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property. I'm just happy we're getting such a good deal out of this.
> Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property.
When there is political will we can absolutely restrict people from doing things with their property. This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
Whether the political will in your specific case has reached that point is another issue, but in many cases it seems to be approaching that level, especially where existing or proposed developments seem like they will directly impact the community that's already there.
The nuclear power plant will only help with pollution if it replaces existing fossil fuel use. If it just meets growing demand, pollution persists, and if growing demand is also filled by some fossil fuels then pollution increases, but just a bit slower because of the nuclear.
And there it is, folks. That is the key issue here - or at least, one of them. This new data center would pollute the environment, not to mention taking up land. The consideration, then, is whether the need for yet another data center justifies the added pollution and land use. That’s a value judgment, and it seems a lot of people say no, we don’t need more data centers, not even for “AI” - at least not enough to justify the added pollution.
You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.
The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.
Tremonton. My understanding is they're getting their gas from a Wyoming company that just declared bankruptcy so good for them. The DC will help them out a lot. I look forward to the nuclear plant opening to help with the other concerns.
AFAIK, the reason for the position was to tap into a large national gas line that runs between Utah and Idaho. I'm not sure where the wyoming company would come into play unless they are purchasing the company and resuming extraction operations.
I recall hearing an interview with a democratic politician (can't recall who), he had this thing: data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy). This seems pretty reasonable to me, if the data centres pay for any build-out of the grid required for their operation and bring online green energy, then they are fine. For the community, worst case they go bust and leave behind an improved grid. Off-grid gas generators are not BYONCE.
If the concern is non-localized resource or debt contention how is it different from any business?
I get generalized anxiety about pace of progress, but then let’s have that discussion rather than the canards about water or noise (which can be real in some cases, but taking GP at their word that’s not the case here).
This is the crux. It's different because data centers are illegally operating gas turbines. If CVS were playing loud music all night every night, nobody would doubt the ability of local law enforcement to shut it down. That is not true of (specifically) AI data centers, so it is rational to reject them until law enforcement gains the ability to police them.
Someone with more knowledge than my 2-minutes of googling should correct me, but...
It sounds like they'd be using the natural gas pipeline they would generate from starts in Opal, Wyoming (goes all the way to Oregon), and that the company behind it was in huge amounts of debt and filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.
So at a glance, I'm curious if making it profitable might be helpful to everyone, but would need someone with more info to chime in before I could say that.
> What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.
The problem is that anyone who actually cares about such thing has like a dozen better venues to deal with it than data centers, yet they haven't in their lives thought of a single one.
What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
Then the DC should surely help fund it, and its existence should be dependent in its completion? Otherwise it will be like every other large scale development that offers this without being on the hook.
> "Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise
Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"
The details are definitely fuzzy when you talk to people. At the same time, the sentiment is fairly solid. People do not like AI. They do like food. A farm may use more water, but people want the output of the farm. They don't want the output of the data centers.
That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.
The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.
It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...
The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers
The farm might not have made food and it might not have made food for human consumption, and even if it did make food it might not be the kind we need to survive. Remember that there are plenty of farms that exist to produce ethanol, HFCS, or inputs for beer/whiskey/etc. makers (which we do not actually need -- drinking is fun but hardly necessary for survival).
I just made a comment about trade offs regarding pollution and land use. This is another good point. Everything is a trade off. If we use a lot of water to get food we need to survive, or even tasty food we enjoy, that’s worth it. But using up a lot of water for a data center, even if it’s less than a farm? That’s still a valid judgment. Lots of people clearly think that’s not worth it as a trade off.
It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.
And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.
What a surprise people don’t want massive structures used for shady purposes built by sociopaths, which may or may not use massive amount of power and resources, which may or may not be used to displace the entirety of the labor work force, or destroy what’s left of society to develop better algorithms. To also be built literally in unfathomablr quantities, in almost ever decent piece of land, using unfathomable amounts of money.
Seriously what’s peoples problem?
This is one of those situations where HN is too smart and thinks logic is the same as reality. Life exists outside of computers
This land he's building it on is cheap and I look forward to my county using it to advantage everyone. Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?"
also you
* "A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center."
* "I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me."
First, maybe they don't trust the company doing the development, or Kevin Oleary. What they are saying may or may not be true, but if they've made a habit of being casual with the truth or not following through on their word it doesn't really matter, does it?
That is tough, and it is why it's so important to maintain one's reputation.
Second, I seem to recall Oleary running around to news outlets telling anyone with a camera that the only reason that anyone would oppose the project was if they were somehow working with the PRC and trying to hurt America.
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?" is a very valid thing you said, and I actually respect it. If, instead, I said something like, "you are just tool of Elon Musk and AI has tricked you" it would probably feel insulting and you would be predisposed be hostile to me.
I think the way the project was done was disrespectful to other people in the area. Ultimately, laws and the voting process will handle it as it should be. If the project can be relied on to bring the benefits without causing the harm that you claim it will, it should be a slam dunk case.
Third, people are concerned about economic security and loss from AI and this specific project can't escape it. Our field has made its own bed there. These concern are valid and public statements by the involved CEOs and large scale layoffs can't be easily dismissed.
Because in Ontario, where his mansion is located, the government hasn't been approving such projects and is facing pressure not to. (https://globalnews.ca/news/12134754/ford-government-to-appro...) Even if the province approved, the lake community surrounding his mansion might not want one, for all the same reasons that the US voters in the source article don't want one.
What does the farm grow? Is it less valuable than what the data center will produce? Because you can't eat data. Utah is full of empty spaces that aren't being put to use (except maybe to set land speed records). Why not use those?
As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.
Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?
That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?
If we're talking about the proposed data center near Brigham City, the area is not part of the Colorado River watershed, so the data center would affect other systems but not the Colorado River.
This is why it's important for government to be built on principles and law, not merely on popular opinion.
From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.
While I agree with where you're coming from in general, the surveillance industry has been happily coasting on downplaying and rejecting such principles for quite some time. Principles like freedom of speech, freedom to own things you purchase, privacy from an ever-growing surveillance industry, freedom from an ever-growing permissions system, freedom to use computing technology that serves your own interests, freedom to partake in a competitive market rather than suffering monopolies. That general lack of principles (beyond merely centralized authoritarian control) is now coming home to roost, as people oppose these projects due to some vague sense of a lack of individual agency, but perhaps can't quite articulate why. In an ideal world, most of the existing data centers would never have been built, because people would be using computing technology under their control rather than authoritarian-by-design "cloud" traps.
Yes. Oleary bought the farm and there will be no farm there anymore. Using the grid would be good for us too. That's economic growth. There will be short term pain but the increased power use will lead to more jobs. We're already building a nuclear power plant.
A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.
> "Noise"
Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.
> "Wildlife refuge"
I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.
These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.
Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.
I get that they have a right to self determination but when did that start meaning others can’t have opinions about (perceived) short sightedness?
Am I allowed to think less of people who vote for stuff like mandatory prayer in schools, even if it is their community and their right to vote for what they want?
Since data centre projects are getting rammed through at breakneck speed despite very widespread opposition, it might look to others like your opinion is actually worth significantly more than theirs, simply because it happens to be shared by a handful of people with god tier money.
A community is not a sovereign nation. I know that eminent domain is considered by many (and historically rightly so) to be a dirty tool, but sometimes it really is in the benefit of the country and its economy to build things even if the people living in or around that area don't like it, especially if their only reason to resisting is "I don't like it".
The water you cite is groundwater. It does not return in the same lifetime it is consumed at that rate. Gaining in this context simply means losing less than before. Weasel words are exactly why voters reject building AI.
>"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.
>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.
>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.
I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.
The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.
Only valid point I've heard. We'll see what happens. All I'm saying is the DC is happening. We can't stop it. That'd be illegal. At least we're getting a good deal out of it.
I think that part of the problem might be that people don't trust corporations. Sure, they say all that, and that may even be the current plan, but is that how things will actually end up? Will there be consequences "unintended" consequences like polution? Will this be used as a stepping stone to something that is harmful?
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.
>People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living.
My Hatian neighbors who do gig economy stuff and are totally not running a car dismantling operation on the side would absolutely benefit if all the people who complain about them and are the driving political force behind the rules used to harass them were disempowered and impoverished.
I think they're a pretty extreme example but you see people in situations like this all across the blue collar economy.
"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"
How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.
In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.
I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.
I think that a lot of people are more sophisticated than you think, and see data center buildouts as WeWork-style unsustainable growth spurred by speculative fervour rather than business fundamentals.
The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?
few points:
1. the water usage claim is reported only by developer. However, the developer omitted the fact that more water is also need to cool down the gas power plant. The project reported only water used by the DC directly.
2. so far nothing firm is committed regarding the DC will produce power on site. I would be careful with what developer claims vs. the reality.
3. isn't the problematic refuge around Locomotive Springs?
4. sure, if you live 1hour away from the DC you won't have issue with noise. But what about the communities closer to the DC?
5. the DC is planning to use as much power as the whole Utah, what will happen with the waste heat energy?
> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation
There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities
I think a lot of this can be chalked up to poor regulation. People think it will cause bad effects because the government bodies and processes are not trusted to prevent that.
I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.
In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.
I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.
In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.
This is my read of it, I don't really have any special data about the average voter, so feel free to disregard my opinions.
I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.
I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"
At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.
That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?
The build out will take a couple years. I don't care about the noise. No one will hear it. It's an hour away from anything. Truly in the middle of nowhere. The DC will employee probably 100 high paid people. That money goes back into my town. The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC. It's going to be the biggest tax generator this county has ever seen by a lot. We just had to raise property taxes by 37% to fund our schools. We need the money.
According to Oleary it will employ about 5000 permanent workers. According to the county it will employ 1-2k permanent workers. These are going to be rented out data centers to other companies who will staff their people here. There will need to be a large number of people managing the power generation. What resources do you have to say it won't employ 100 people?
These numbers are pretty inconsistent with other major data center rollouts. Furthermore, there are no repercussions (AFAIK) if the project fails to deliver that many permanent jobs. Oleary can say all he wants but unless there is some specific tax or legal measure that says "you must pay at least 2,000 FTE at a rate of $150k/year for at least 20 years" then it's basically impossible to guarantee these numbers. And frankly no data center developer would sign up for that liability knowing full well that humans at data center may well end up being automated (even more than they are today).
The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.
The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?
You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?
You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.
You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.
I seriously doubt it needs 100 highly paid people. These will be automated to death. A few guys employed out of state, periodically visiting to swap out dead GPUs and staying in the nearest hotel. Maybe a bored HVAC engineer on site for maintenance.
I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
> The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC
You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.
According to the county 30 million per year during the build out then 108 million at max capacity. Our budget last year was 76.3 million. This will be more money than we know what to do with.
This is classic Haidt's Righteous Mind stuff -- people vibe out a moral judgement, then generate rational explanations post-hoc. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out what the vibed judgement is.
You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.
Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".
Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?
Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers:
* Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc).
* Massive economic destabilization and disruption
* Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility
* Wars and international conflict
* Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry
* Takeover by governments, use by threat actors
* A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.
You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.
Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls
Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.
And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.
"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.
Yes, I do. Know why I think that? Under threat of another expensive lawsuit, my local datacenter forced our town council to give a 50% tax cut for 12 years. So they are already able to not pay about 1.7 billion in taxes. If they could pay $0, they would.
Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.
WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."
And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.
Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.
But then what's the implication here? Why would there be large scale propaganda or otherwise effort against large companies who have and make a lot of money? In whose interest is it to get people to dislike the data centers (other than, perhaps debatably, the people themselves)? If its all truly just people being duped, to what end does the naïvete serve?
It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.
Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.
Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.
My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)
If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.
Are you saying they're going to construct the data center then move it to a different location? Or are you suggesting they're going to change the laws of physics so that sound propagates differently?
I'm saying that just because they say that they will generate their own electricity, or require less water than a farm, doesn't mean that they will continue to do so into the future.
All of these counter points? Do you think they're going to pull a fast one and move the building hundreds of miles at the last second into someone's back yard? What about water? Are they going to at the last minute change the cooling from a closed loop system? This is going to use 162 million gallons less per year than the farm. How in the world is the DC going to burn through that much extra water at the last minute? Are they going to pull a fast one on us and just hook the building into the grid? What are you talking about?
You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
1. Closed loop water systems use chemicals that can leech out of the system. There is 100% going to be more discoveries as time goes on with such a fast build out. Maybe not enough to make it not worthwhile? But not 100% safe either.
2. I’m anti-data center. I think at some point, you pull the levers you have? I think the tech industry is too consolidated and wields too much power, and the whole data center buildout has been done under a shroud of secrecy.
I think it’s rational to pull the levers you have, when the industry is predicting something close to the apocalypse.
Yes it’s mostly vibes, but until the industry stops acting like fucking nutters. I’m voting on vibes.
No, I just know how business works. When you are doing something like this you establish the bare minimum as the baseline, get your foot in the door, then start testing boundaries.
Also these buildings will be abandoned within the next couple years as models move more towards the edge.
>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.
People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.
The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.
data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.
Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.
This might be the case, but it's not going to stop the technology from stealing your jobs. Billionaires in countries like China are going to leap frog over the US in terms of technology or the billionaires here will just build there instead.
If you think Flock cameras are bad, you have no idea the kind of surveillance the Chinese government uses on their people.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped trying to help people help themselves. Instead, I just watch and close my door in their face when they beg for help.
i get the impression that comment was tongue in cheek, but my unironic opinion is that AI is bad for humanity, and it's good and correct to oppose data centers on the grounds that AI is bad.
According to The Reverse Centaur’s Guide,[1] capital investment in AI is so high that the only possible way for the investments to make enough (and to avoid a bubble) is if whole classes of jobs are automated wholesale. And of course that Capital then takes the saved money from that. Maybe some people dislike datacenters-for-AI based on that. Because it’s all part of the same scheme.
Maybe people who don’t quite like that should be more articulate about it rather than using seeming post hoc reasoning like “water”? I don’t know. In my experience the bar for frustrated-five-on-the-street is quite high if they want to avoid an aww-shucks this voting bloc and their social medias.
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
Replacing human jobs should be the dream of all people. You want humans doing drudgery when it could be automated by machines? Why?
> And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
— Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891
This is explicitly about manual labor. The things on the verge of being automated are precisely not in the "sweeping a slushy crossing" category. If Wilde was here to see the things the slop-peddlers are calling art, he'd be distraught.
Yea thats fine but you think they will distribute the wealth to you in particular?
i mentioned it in my comment too
> Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners.
i am not conviced that markzuckerberg stays up all night building datacenters so he can pass on that wealth to you.
> I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading
That's unfortunate, as manual labor will be the only thing left if AI companies have their way.
It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.
At this point I really can't see any other justification. The amount of misinformation and hysteria around this issue is like nothing I've seen before.
* We've built a technology that has obliterated entry level hiring
* That technology might obliterate all the other "normal" person white collar jobs. The kinds of jobs you can clock in and out and not think about them outside of that. Instead, every new job will be a managerial one working with 500 agents.
* Loaning all the money to build these data centers and train these models costs so much it cranks rates through the roof, so we've frozen the real estate market and nobody can move or buy in
* The past 10 years of American politics have been defined by how the last time we did a broad replacement of labor event like that for a group of people. Their standard of living permanently shrunk (the NAFTA disrupted working class), and we may end up doing that to you guys again. The only solution is that the government is going to have to do some sort of UBI or redistribution (which the last time they did during COVID, it was followed by the greatest inflation we've seen in our lifetimes)
* This technology might literally destroy the world in the next 10 years, and we keep accidentally releasing it into the world like its Skynet. But we are not responsible for it, and by the way its unavoidable with this technology. Somewhere on the other side, utopia will arise (No really your standard of living will actually go up after losing your job this time unlike everyone else, trust me.)
Then half the people in this thread is smugly are acting baffled at why people don't want this, and going "Hey they don't know that much about data center logistics but still oppose this. What is up with that?." Forget about if a data center actually ends up being a net drag if its near you and the standard nimby stuff. Even if it weren't, what benefit does marching towards this future have for anybody not in the top 10%? Sure, you can make a bunch of economic theory arguments: growth is always good, stagflation, Luddites, etc. But in practice, economic advancement and technology over the past 30 years has advanced so fast people can't even comprehend it, and in return everybody is becoming stupider, more unhappy, polarized, and the median standard of living has dropped as rich people have 20x their net worth. Why would a normal person want more of this?
The thing that gets me is why the hell are these things being powered with loud generators and fossil fuels? These facilities are billed as being 21st century technological marvels. But what's actually delivered looks like something out of the industrial revolution. Harvesting old jet engines from decommissioned planes in order to power your facility? You've got to be joking.
This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.
How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered? The only on-the-shelf low carbon tech with the reliability and deployability we need is nuclear. Any other discussion is just pointless.
This is a good example of feeling like I've been transported back in time. A time before people had an answer to the question: How can I use a computer if I've disconnected it from the grid? (I guess that takes us back to 1980)
> How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered?
A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.
I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.
Neither of those get to the carbon neutral point of the whole endeavor. Just more complicated steps to shuffle the deck chairs around. Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines. The costly part is a political and regulatory problem that is more easily solved than paving over all the farm land with solar panels or strip mining third world countries for lithium.
The fact that Americans can be made to vote for NIMBY policies was well known. My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
As someone who grew up in a country with near zero growth (some would call it “sustainable growth”) and the resultant stagflation, I wouldn’t wish that feeling of growing into an economy where you can only aspire to take from others, on my worst enemies.
I agree with these voters on almost everything, from the need for more energy and water infrastructure to using this growth to pay for basic needs like healthcare. But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
It seems like we are habituating the American public to just reject that and hope it goes somewhere else (tm) while they get the gains and that’s not how this works.
I think this is missing the issue. It's not the cranes and walls that bother people, it's the tech companies. They've shown themselves repeatedly to be bad faith and exploitative actors. Now they're asking to move in. It's easy to understand why people are saying no.
And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but that should be highly counter-intuitive. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor; society entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive work as well as increase unemployment is quite likely. My prediction is based on 'what comes next' but if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month, this is all going to be, again understandably, seen as pie in the sky.
I'm opposed to NIMBYism 99% of the time, but these data centers aren't being opposed for no reason. There's stories coming out all over the country of negative impacts on communities and backroom deals with local officials who sign NDAs during negotiations. There's a goldrush on in the US to build these out and when that happens companies run roughshod over communities.
Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone, and protecting the environment and ecosystems for long-term sustainability. I’m not even remotely convinced we need ‘number go up’ to make this happen - if anything, the hyper focus on “economic growth” seems to run counter to equity and sustainability.
>My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.
How are data centers replacing small businesses? That sounds like a politicians broken speech reader.
They’re literally bringing jobs and paying out the ass, the unions love em [1] and absolutely supercharging local tax revenue, just basic economic growth stuff.
> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.
Why should we believe that we will meaningfully benefit from that economic growth? We aren't benefiting much now. And if we won't benefit then why should we care about it?
Data centers take resources, land, and ways of life from rural communities to give economic growth opportunities to people in cities without paying those rural communities.
> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
Maybe it looks like a reduction in monopolies, increased competition, lowering of prices as automation pays dividends, and a general de-consolidation of power.
It doesn't look like 4-companies owning the whole stock market and incumbents using AI to cut every worker they can with no longterm plan, using AI to deny insurance claims, and rig the deck in the most unconscionable uncompetitive ways they can.
There are outcomes much worse than "flat" if we aren't careful, and even the AI CEOs say as much.
> But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
There is absolutely no need for cranes to show up in or near existing neighborhoods to build data centers. The US is not out of remote land that would be well suited for this purpose, but building in those places requires spending more money to build supporting infrastructure, so businesses prefer to avoid that cost.
If the growth is truly beneficial, it should be able to pay for itself, and I think that is what people want to see enforced.
I think that as an industry, we'll have to make the case persuasively that the datacenters won't hurt quality of life for nearby residents, that they'll have a positive influence on the local economy, and that even more broadly that the benefit from AI is shared and not captured by small group of the ultra wealthy.
That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.
I am not suggesting they will. That's a discussion between the communities and the datacenter developers. And the datacenter developers will have a track record they'll be able to stand behind with prior projects, or they'll have to explain why the harms were understated and the benefits were overstated.
For the record, I don't think this is necessarily a positive development for our field or the US. But the solution was one or two years in the past and involved more truthful and principled behavior by the companies developing these projects.
This election speaks for itself in terms of how the population feels about the matter.
Why are you upset that citizens have a right in how their communities are developed? Do you not understand that a majority of people do not care about helping capitalists get slightly richer and would rather have a life of quiet dignity?
Did they reject data centers? Or did they represent the current ownership model behind data centers?
Tech “ownership models” have accelerated the separation of haves and have nots. I’ve wondered if datacenters were regulated such that they become public goods (libraries, power and water infra, etc), if the public would invest more agreeably in them.
And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.
"No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”
Because tech has all the money and all the power these days. They do whatever they want with basically unlimited funds. Big tech has reshaped everything the internet used to be just because they can. Our entire workspace is getting reshaped and who is going to benefit the most? Large tech companies.
Most people feel like they have no say in anything that is going on because a handful of insanely large tech companies are just deciding the future for everyone, and it's in their own best interest- not the best interest of the poeple.
There are a set of data centers that got built where local laws were (and continue to be) broken. Messaging from the data center builders is that accepting their will is inevitable and they are above regulation. Given these, it is an entirely reasonable position to ask for a complete halt.
This doesn't happen when UPS opens a distribution center or CVS opens a store because everybody knows UPS and CVS are bound by local laws. That cannot be said of e.g. SpaceX, so the only play is to keep them out, full stop. Nobody wants a neighbor who is above the law.
Thats the only good thing to come out of this. The rest of it really highlights how we acrewed up violating personal liberty with overly agressive zoning and other regulation.
People cared about TARP because these were companies managing their retirements and banks holding their savings. They had been around for 100 years+ and many had branches in their hometown.
Very few people know, or care, about AI companies in any way.
yes, happened under both a red and blue administration. It was the perfect example to show that political party is meaningless when it comes to financial bailouts.
Not at all. The reasonable democrats will be forced to clean this mess (and Iran) while spending their newly found political capital and pissing off their base.
AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.
And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.
Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.
I saw first hand the Port Washington, Wisconsin data center build and spoke to a guy working on the project. As he points out, the pay is the best he's ever had, but as construction is always boom and bust, he was under no illusion that it would last forever.
Dump truck divers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, and many other construction trades were benefiting within a 2-hour radius of the site.
Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities. Clearly they must be built correctly, but the cash injection to workers pockets must be a welcomed addition to local families.
> Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities.
When the data center is built and the dump trucks leave, what is the ongoing benefit for that community?
What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development with similar land and resource use? It seems to me that datacenters have low ongoing employment requirements compared to those resources used, and that many of the benefits of running the datacenter aren't gained by the local community but rather by businesses located far away.
That's what happens when you are building something too fast and affects negativity the local economy. I personal doubt this data centres are really the issue. But we got what we paid for.
FUD spread from competing nation states is where it all originated from. Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began. If you live in a medium to large city goto google maps and search for "datacenter" in your town, i bet you live within 5 miles of one that you've never even noticed before.
There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.
edit: let me add that the price of natural gas in TX is effectively zero.. or may even be negative. There's plenty of energy available. Now, availability of turbines to convert those chemical bonds to eletricity is another matter but the gas is there.
The true price of gas power production is the externalized cost of its emissions, which is currently not reflected in the market price but instead paid for by all of humanity.
Getting people to vote against building anything is easy, of course when people start complaining about lack of housing, or a failing economy its quite a bit more challenging for them to recognize how regulation (that they may have voted for) led to those issues.
The difference is that these AI data centers use significantly more power on a per-rack basis (and thus requiring much bigger backup generators) and generate much more heat (requiring much more cooling) than the data centers of old.
If datacenters in space becomes a thing, we will then learn that the rockets that launch them release neurotoxins into the air, and call for an immediate moratorium on rocket launches.
Anyone with the care to pay attention to what is going on realizes that the pushback on DCs has nothing to do with DCs, and everything to do with fear about AI.
A lot of noise, pollution, resource usage, power sound problems etc can be easily solved. The one that I think people are frustrated is the wealth inequality and data centers are directly seen as making few people insanely rich while their lives are not improving whatsoever. I don't see a solution to this yet.
How do the jobs and local economic benefit compare between a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, and a datacenter?
Are companies proposing steel mills and semiconductor fabs directly adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods?
Will those developments pay for the required infrastructure expansions, or get special deals to waive those costs in return for building in that community?
Mostly yes. Everyone would also prefer that steel mills semiconductor fabs get built somewhere else, where they personally don't have to deal with any of the externalities.
I don't know why people voted for this. Probably something to do with all the big tech CEOs visibly paying bribes and tribute to the corrupt and massively unpopular president. I doubt the anti-data-center backlash is as extreme without that.
But also just NIMBY. No one likes to live near industry.
To get this big a backlash, you need a variety of reasons to oppose that appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Inevitably some of those reasons will be silly (a lot of people talked themselves into voting for a 2nd term for Trump, after all!).
The sad reality is neither sides' politicians care. Conservatives opened the doors for the elitists, now the liberals come in and close the door behind them, ensuring no other competitors get in. This "Dems vs Reps" opposition portrayed in the media is really just a clandestine partnership. And the general public falls for it every time.
We had a clown running in our local election who had "no data centers" on their election signs. The area they were running to control is the last place you would ever want to put a data center. This clown won. Politicians use this to fool stupid people.
Yep same as GOP using trans panic, women in men's sports, Haitians eating cats and dogs, gender reassignment surgery in schools. These things aren't real issues but it works.
Data centers are the way of the future. We can either embrace them or fall behind places like China. I definitely think they should pay their own way 100%, but for God's sake, look at the big picture. Everyone uses AI in some way or another every day.
Has anyone done an analysis of how these laws are defining "data center"? Anyone accidentally ban having a rack of servers on an office closet? That could suck for a lot of small businesses. I'm all for local autonomy, but knee jerk local laws can also be... messy.
Laws are public, you are welcome to go read them. All of the ones I've read define it based on [x] megawatt of compute or similar. None of them are banning a rack of servers in a closet.
I would be surprised if a rack of servers in an office closet could realistically draw 25 megawatts of energy, which is generally the cutoff that these local ordinances use to define a "data center". Keeping in mind that the cost of commercial electricity alone for powering even a 1 megawatt data center continuously for 1 month would have to be at least 100,000 dollars, right?
I haven't seen a broad analysis, but every specific one I've looked into accounted for your concern and defined some sort of minimum size or power draw.
They never do that in the "first round". Usually you gotta wait for a compliance industry to spring up and then they inevitably lobby for the definition of people who need to pay the compliance industry to get watered down. It's just the natural incentive creep of the system.
its going to bring a fraction of the jobs they are projecting. and just most jobs will be temp/ contract just to build the damn thing. after its built it 90%+ related to the project will be out of job and likely leave your town (best case)
They won't, because we'll still have no money to pay for healthcare as a result of AI taking our jobs. To the contrary, right now the rational choice is to not allow these AI farms to be installed so that many of us (this is not only about the US) still have access to a decent lifestyle (including decent health, that is).
AI should be owned collectively and we should all benefit from the loss of jobs. It was trained on our data and has no value without our labor, so it is our rightful property.
i'm not cheering or crying because of the results but curious about what happens next, I guess ready or not, into the future we go! Do me a favor and right down the 10 things promised to you by the people you voted for and put it an envelope to open 2 years from now at the next election. I think that's a worthwhile exercise and asked my kids (17 and 14) to do the same since they were both super tuned in to the election and have their own opinions.
They’re probably inevitable anyway. Nobody likes to live near any kind of industry. For me as a kid that was dairy farms. Fucking horrible. Nobody lining up to close them down though. Hog farms are also terrible. Chickens I can imagine too, never seen one personally though.
Even something relatively innocuous like an orange grove. Rented a house in one before. Peaceful most of the time, free citrus. But when it got too cold they’d burn diesel in these little tower things and run a wind machine (like a giant reverse windmill) that was loud as fuck all night.
Had some relatives that lived near some kind of paper pulping plant. Guess if that sucked or not?
Now that I think about it, the local environment not smelling like absolute shit is probably a relatively recent development.
We have so much vacant industrial land in the rust belt (so-called "brownfields"), with good access and utility infrastructure, why not build the data centers there? Why do they need to go on farmland in the countryside?
Places like Gary, IN should be courting them. Great access, on a huge lake so water is no issue, not in a hurricane or earthquake zone, and they desperately need people/companies paying property taxes.
I lived near mega diaries and oil fields growing up. Depending on the wind you either smelled manure or sulfur. People used to say "smells like money" because ag and oil were the source of jobs in the area.
I also believe they’re inevitable. Capital will find places without opposition and build them. There are thousands of jurisdictions in the US and capital usually wins.
I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.
Pretty much. Mushroom farms smell like shit when the wind turns. Even just normal farms smell like manure at various times of the year. Amazon fulfillment centres are hideous and create a lot of traffic in the surrounding area. There's a reason building industry near residential in the SimCity series causes residential property values to drop.
are data centers profitable, or are there currently a ton of hopes and dreams filled by outrageous investments that will bring down the economy if/when the bubble bursts? i am worried that it's the latter, but i have no clue and it feels too stupid to be true. are they actually making a profit?
Anything with a whiff of data centers were squashed. Here in Rhode Island there were rumors that the economic development ballot question was so vague that it could end up being a data center.
The narrative consistently in all the advertisement was that there was some sort of “loophole, which would allow politicians to lower the income threshold at any point without needing a vote”. I probably heard that statement over a thousand times in the past couple months.
That and even Gavin himself got on the pulpit to preach how it was poorly drafted and shouldn’t be passed. I legitimately don’t think I saw a single person or advertisement for it, you’re the first.
US voters will do absolutely anything but stop using the apps and technology from Big Tech that are powered by these data centers. It's always hilarious when someone shows me a Reel or TikTok about how they hate data centers. Often, they will also send off an AI response on why data centers are problematic. They are completely oblivious or knowingly ignorant.
So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it.
I think they're saying that "data centers" have become a totem, where people believe that rejecting datacenter development projects will solve problems that cannot be solved this way. I've encountered more than one person who thinks, for example, that if we just ban datacenters there will be no powerful AI systems so we won't need to study their capabilities and risks in detail.
You don't need to have the correct reason for making the correct decision. What rejecting data centers will do is slow down the obscene excessive demand for more memory being taken off the consumer market, even if just a little bit. It will force AI models to become more efficient within their resource constraints instead of sucking up all the air in the room.
Sure. But it's risky to let people make correct decisions for incorrect reasons, because they may react in very silly ways when their goals aren't achieved. If the populist tide turns onto memory companies ("stop making AI chips!"), and a widely supported protest encampment blocks Micron's new fabs, that's going to increase your memory woes more than datacenter moratoriums helped them.
The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that.
I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about democracy lately. The average voter will ask for a grab bag of contradictory things and then complain about attempts to deliver any one of them. My local subreddit wants cheap housing but also wants to preserve farmland and maintain historic buildings and welcome more immigrants at the same time.
My gripe is less with democracy and more with the ad-driven economy that has taken over.
The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.
There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.
I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit?
The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!
A ridiculous gotcha on a site where every other article is about using AI to automate your job, solve frontier math problems, or port old video games to new platforms. So to be clear nothing is our fault here? It's all just about the billionaires "making us" use AI for all these things?
If my government just decided to wire $1B account into my personal account without strings attached I'd 100% accept that in ecstasy. So if I say "spending money this way is unfair" I'm a hypocrite???
Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical?
Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and petulance.
Common pattern:
"I'm campaigning against A."
"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."
"I don't care!"
The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.
The high-level solution, though, is to stop concentrating housing and all the supporting infrastructure. NIMBY is a positive force in that regard.
The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.
BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.
Data centres have no real reason to be built in anyone's backyard. To prove it I'll just say that some of the guys that want to put it in your backyard, also ponder putting it in space.
Forgive my ignorance, but how would the current data center proposals "economically benefit their children"? It seems like a local land concession that would benefit a national economy, but hardly do anything long-term for the locality where the data center is built (maybe ~100 jobs and some property taxes).
Not sure where you've been but US productivity has skyrocketed since adoption of AI and this productivity increase has not been replicated in jurisdictions slower to adopt AI. This pushes up wages, decreases costs etc.
That's aside from the build-out jobs.
Anyone who works anywhere close to data center build including construction, networking, sysadmin is cleaning up right now. Their wages have doubled and demand is huge.
Maybe it is 100 permanent jobs, but that's huge for a small community, and the thousands of temporary jobs make an impact, too.
Unless you're really ideology driven there's very few things that can be built around your neighbourhood (especially in a suburb) that will make it more valuable or pleasant to live. NIMBY is just not wanting to lose things.
- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
Welcome to NIMBY
In other words, welcome to NIABUDSAGTTYGAOP, BATPESLETSGWFLSTL
But I get how that's not as fun to engage with for pithy internet rhetoric.
“Nono, I’m not NIMBY, I just want to set up some goalposts that I can arbitrarily move whenever I want. I just want veto power. Trust me, I’ll use it responsibly”
Decades of no housing follows
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
(now you have two planning permission problems!)
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.
> for the sake of shareholder value
This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.
No they aren't
They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit
They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.
The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.
If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.
Instead Altman says it will destroy the world: https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-sam-altman...
So it's bad for the world according to its proponents, and at the same time, a bad neighbour? Why would anyone not vote against it given those?
That’s a great thing.
If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!
And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.
Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
/s
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?
Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.
> This is economic growth and a good thing.
Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.
What on earth is this "If I get in a car accident, it's actually a good thing because I get to buy a new, better car" logical reasoning?
(Farms don’t employ many people either.)
I can't eat the output of a data center, though.
Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue? I am skeptical because typically these projects receive tax payer money.
> Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC
A nuclear power plant takes 6-10 years to build in the US, and sometimes even longer.
According to the county FAQ: https://www.boxeldercountyut.gov/661/Stratos-Page-FAQ-Page
> What tax revenue is expected?
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.
And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.
Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.
AFAIK recent data centers are all either:
1. connected to the existing grid, or
2. using natural gas generators
There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.
You aren't getting a good deal.
Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.
The issue with incremental problems and quantity problems is you can't point at a single one and go "here, here is the problem" (at least most of the time), you have to look at the entire problem and go "Shit, the paperclip maximizer building one paperclip isn't an issue, it's turning everything into paperclips that's the issue".
And that's where we are.
(ghost of Bastiat laughs in the distance)
Yeah, from natgas right? Or maybe diesel generators? Or are they building one of the practically nonexistent green energy data centers?
Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property. I'm just happy we're getting such a good deal out of this.
When there is political will we can absolutely restrict people from doing things with their property. This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
Whether the political will in your specific case has reached that point is another issue, but in many cases it seems to be approaching that level, especially where existing or proposed developments seem like they will directly impact the community that's already there.
You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.
The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.
There is also the increase in cost of borrowing for everyone. Going this fast is just insane.
I get generalized anxiety about pace of progress, but then let’s have that discussion rather than the canards about water or noise (which can be real in some cases, but taking GP at their word that’s not the case here).
This is the crux. It's different because data centers are illegally operating gas turbines. If CVS were playing loud music all night every night, nobody would doubt the ability of local law enforcement to shut it down. That is not true of (specifically) AI data centers, so it is rational to reject them until law enforcement gains the ability to police them.
It sounds like they'd be using the natural gas pipeline they would generate from starts in Opal, Wyoming (goes all the way to Oregon), and that the company behind it was in huge amounts of debt and filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.
So at a glance, I'm curious if making it profitable might be helpful to everyone, but would need someone with more info to chime in before I could say that.
You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.
I think people would be more open to the data center buildout if the data center projects built their own clean energy infrastructure
We the voters 100% can.
The nuclear will get delayed. Always does.
A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise
Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"
That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.
The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.
It uses less water than many other things, too, I'm sure.
But the farm made food. What does the data center create that humans need to survive?
And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.
Seriously what’s peoples problem?
This is one of those situations where HN is too smart and thinks logic is the same as reality. Life exists outside of computers
also you
* "A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center."
* "I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me."
First, maybe they don't trust the company doing the development, or Kevin Oleary. What they are saying may or may not be true, but if they've made a habit of being casual with the truth or not following through on their word it doesn't really matter, does it?
That is tough, and it is why it's so important to maintain one's reputation.
Second, I seem to recall Oleary running around to news outlets telling anyone with a camera that the only reason that anyone would oppose the project was if they were somehow working with the PRC and trying to hurt America.
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?" is a very valid thing you said, and I actually respect it. If, instead, I said something like, "you are just tool of Elon Musk and AI has tricked you" it would probably feel insulting and you would be predisposed be hostile to me.
I think the way the project was done was disrespectful to other people in the area. Ultimately, laws and the voting process will handle it as it should be. If the project can be relied on to bring the benefits without causing the harm that you claim it will, it should be a slam dunk case.
Third, people are concerned about economic security and loss from AI and this specific project can't escape it. Our field has made its own bed there. These concern are valid and public statements by the involved CEOs and large scale layoffs can't be easily dismissed.
As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.
Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?
That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Utah
From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.
So the farm is no longer there? As in it is using zero water right now?
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Serious doubt. They will use whichever is cheaper, and that's going to be the grid.
A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.
> "Noise"
Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.
> "Wildlife refuge"
I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.
These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.
This is the crux of the whole thing is it not? People want money into their communities and even more into their pockets:
https://nationalsecurity.virginia.edu/research/what-american...
But not everything turns out fine:
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/richland-p...
Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.
Am I allowed to think less of people who vote for stuff like mandatory prayer in schools, even if it is their community and their right to vote for what they want?
But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.
>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.
>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.
The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
My Hatian neighbors who do gig economy stuff and are totally not running a car dismantling operation on the side would absolutely benefit if all the people who complain about them and are the driving political force behind the rules used to harass them were disempowered and impoverished.
I think they're a pretty extreme example but you see people in situations like this all across the blue collar economy.
How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.
In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.
I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.
Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?
comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation
There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities
In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.
I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.
In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.
I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.
I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"
At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.
That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.
What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?
The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.
The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?
You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?
You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.
You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.
I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.
You're still wrong about the job creation benefits. But if this is really, verifiably true it sounds like a good deal.
Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".
Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?
Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers: * Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc). * Massive economic destabilization and disruption * Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility * Wars and international conflict * Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry * Takeover by governments, use by threat actors * A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.
How much?
Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.
And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.
"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.
WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."
And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.
Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.
i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm
Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.
Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.
ps. Have never used tiktok
You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
2. I’m anti-data center. I think at some point, you pull the levers you have? I think the tech industry is too consolidated and wields too much power, and the whole data center buildout has been done under a shroud of secrecy.
I think it’s rational to pull the levers you have, when the industry is predicting something close to the apocalypse.
Yes it’s mostly vibes, but until the industry stops acting like fucking nutters. I’m voting on vibes.
If they have a grid connection, they are going to take power from the grid when cheaper than generating power.
Also these buildings will be abandoned within the next couple years as models move more towards the edge.
The policy-informed theory of How The Rich Are Irrationally Hated.
You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for
Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.
All farming should be stopped immediately and converted to data centres, then we’ll have unlimited water!
Some farming should indeed be stopped, and we would have more water. Farming is not an unmitigated food, no matter how sarcastic you are.
The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.
Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.
If you think Flock cameras are bad, you have no idea the kind of surveillance the Chinese government uses on their people.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped trying to help people help themselves. Instead, I just watch and close my door in their face when they beg for help.
Maybe people who don’t quite like that should be more articulate about it rather than using seeming post hoc reasoning like “water”? I don’t know. In my experience the bar for frustrated-five-on-the-street is quite high if they want to avoid an aww-shucks this voting bloc and their social medias.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621575/thereversecenta...
AI companies don't exactly try to hide the fact that their end goal is replacing all human jobs.
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
[1] https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#3-eco...
[2] https://eletric-vehicles.com/tesla/tesla-q2-earnings-here-ar...
[3] all on X, https://x.com/sama
https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/anthropic-ceo-warning-ai-job-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go...
> And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
— Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891
i mentioned it in my comment too
> Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners.
i am not conviced that markzuckerberg stays up all night building datacenters so he can pass on that wealth to you.
That's unfortunate, as manual labor will be the only thing left if AI companies have their way.
* We've built a technology that has obliterated entry level hiring
* That technology might obliterate all the other "normal" person white collar jobs. The kinds of jobs you can clock in and out and not think about them outside of that. Instead, every new job will be a managerial one working with 500 agents.
* Loaning all the money to build these data centers and train these models costs so much it cranks rates through the roof, so we've frozen the real estate market and nobody can move or buy in
* The past 10 years of American politics have been defined by how the last time we did a broad replacement of labor event like that for a group of people. Their standard of living permanently shrunk (the NAFTA disrupted working class), and we may end up doing that to you guys again. The only solution is that the government is going to have to do some sort of UBI or redistribution (which the last time they did during COVID, it was followed by the greatest inflation we've seen in our lifetimes)
* This technology might literally destroy the world in the next 10 years, and we keep accidentally releasing it into the world like its Skynet. But we are not responsible for it, and by the way its unavoidable with this technology. Somewhere on the other side, utopia will arise (No really your standard of living will actually go up after losing your job this time unlike everyone else, trust me.)
Then half the people in this thread is smugly are acting baffled at why people don't want this, and going "Hey they don't know that much about data center logistics but still oppose this. What is up with that?." Forget about if a data center actually ends up being a net drag if its near you and the standard nimby stuff. Even if it weren't, what benefit does marching towards this future have for anybody not in the top 10%? Sure, you can make a bunch of economic theory arguments: growth is always good, stagflation, Luddites, etc. But in practice, economic advancement and technology over the past 30 years has advanced so fast people can't even comprehend it, and in return everybody is becoming stupider, more unhappy, polarized, and the median standard of living has dropped as rich people have 20x their net worth. Why would a normal person want more of this?
This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.
A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.
I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.
As someone who grew up in a country with near zero growth (some would call it “sustainable growth”) and the resultant stagflation, I wouldn’t wish that feeling of growing into an economy where you can only aspire to take from others, on my worst enemies.
I agree with these voters on almost everything, from the need for more energy and water infrastructure to using this growth to pay for basic needs like healthcare. But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
It seems like we are habituating the American public to just reject that and hope it goes somewhere else (tm) while they get the gains and that’s not how this works.
And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but that should be highly counter-intuitive. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor; society entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive work as well as increase unemployment is quite likely. My prediction is based on 'what comes next' but if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month, this is all going to be, again understandably, seen as pie in the sky.
If this is true wouldn’t it be nice if the municipal budget had some room to manouver? [1]
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2026/09/19/700-bill...
I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.
They’re literally bringing jobs and paying out the ass, the unions love em [1] and absolutely supercharging local tax revenue, just basic economic growth stuff.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/opinion/data-centers-elec...
The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.
It's mostly just a punchline for stuff once you step outside of HN and such..
Also known as China, future world superpower. They have enough political continuity to formulate a strategy at national scale and execute on it.
It's crazy how they just keep winning while the US and democracies the world over keep shooting themselves in the foot.
> while they get the gains
The gains continue to flow into the US... For now. I wonder how long that'll last.
Maybe it looks like a reduction in monopolies, increased competition, lowering of prices as automation pays dividends, and a general de-consolidation of power.
It doesn't look like 4-companies owning the whole stock market and incumbents using AI to cut every worker they can with no longterm plan, using AI to deny insurance claims, and rig the deck in the most unconscionable uncompetitive ways they can.
There are outcomes much worse than "flat" if we aren't careful, and even the AI CEOs say as much.
There is absolutely no need for cranes to show up in or near existing neighborhoods to build data centers. The US is not out of remote land that would be well suited for this purpose, but building in those places requires spending more money to build supporting infrastructure, so businesses prefer to avoid that cost.
If the growth is truly beneficial, it should be able to pay for itself, and I think that is what people want to see enforced.
That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.
They don’t need more than a handful of people to operate.
For the record, I don't think this is necessarily a positive development for our field or the US. But the solution was one or two years in the past and involved more truthful and principled behavior by the companies developing these projects.
This election speaks for itself in terms of how the population feels about the matter.
Tech “ownership models” have accelerated the separation of haves and have nots. I’ve wondered if datacenters were regulated such that they become public goods (libraries, power and water infra, etc), if the public would invest more agreeably in them.
Just policy thinking out loud.
And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”
Most people feel like they have no say in anything that is going on because a handful of insanely large tech companies are just deciding the future for everyone, and it's in their own best interest- not the best interest of the poeple.
This doesn't happen when UPS opens a distribution center or CVS opens a store because everybody knows UPS and CVS are bound by local laws. That cannot be said of e.g. SpaceX, so the only play is to keep them out, full stop. Nobody wants a neighbor who is above the law.
Very few people know, or care, about AI companies in any way.
That's how things should work. Bailouts are socialism for corporations.
AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.
And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.
Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.
Dump truck divers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, and many other construction trades were benefiting within a 2-hour radius of the site.
Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities. Clearly they must be built correctly, but the cash injection to workers pockets must be a welcomed addition to local families.
When the data center is built and the dump trucks leave, what is the ongoing benefit for that community?
What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development with similar land and resource use? It seems to me that datacenters have low ongoing employment requirements compared to those resources used, and that many of the benefits of running the datacenter aren't gained by the local community but rather by businesses located far away.
There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
edit: let me add that the price of natural gas in TX is effectively zero.. or may even be negative. There's plenty of energy available. Now, availability of turbines to convert those chemical bonds to eletricity is another matter but the gas is there.
Some near me have wetlands around them and the houses bordering them are very desirable.
Seems like some bad apples ruined it for everyone.
- Every existing data center just became much more valuable
- If "data centers in space" actually work then their value just grew significantly
Anyone with the care to pay attention to what is going on realizes that the pushback on DCs has nothing to do with DCs, and everything to do with fear about AI.
yeah, from tiktok no less.
Are companies proposing steel mills and semiconductor fabs directly adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods?
Will those developments pay for the required infrastructure expansions, or get special deals to waive those costs in return for building in that community?
But also just NIMBY. No one likes to live near industry.
To get this big a backlash, you need a variety of reasons to oppose that appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Inevitably some of those reasons will be silly (a lot of people talked themselves into voting for a 2nd term for Trump, after all!).
On the bright side, here's a politician who can keep their promise.
This is not going to affect small businesses.
> benefit from the loss of jobs
This will only benefit some part of the present ruling-class (and partially some of their tech-minions putting those policies in effect)
Private compounds owned by billionaires who believe data centers are the best. Seems to me, they already have a solution to their problem.
Even something relatively innocuous like an orange grove. Rented a house in one before. Peaceful most of the time, free citrus. But when it got too cold they’d burn diesel in these little tower things and run a wind machine (like a giant reverse windmill) that was loud as fuck all night.
Had some relatives that lived near some kind of paper pulping plant. Guess if that sucked or not?
Now that I think about it, the local environment not smelling like absolute shit is probably a relatively recent development.
I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.
Data Centers on the Ballot
https://datacentersontheballot.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50361608)
Drake Yes: Green compute sanctuaries
Bet me this isn’t just going to be a PR issue.
That and even Gavin himself got on the pulpit to preach how it was poorly drafted and shouldn’t be passed. I legitimately don’t think I saw a single person or advertisement for it, you’re the first.
Political choices have trade-offs. We have to give up some things to gain others.
But somehow politicians get away with promising to solve all problems all at once, even though that's clearly impossible.
The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.
There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.
The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!
Smart phone or other things this sentence is usually trotted out for not so much.
Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical?
Common pattern:
"I'm campaigning against A."
"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."
"I don't care!"
The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.
In my local area, there's routinely local opposition to substations built due to growing residential demand and water infrastructure facility build.
They're old boomers who don't want anything built, especially not if it will economically benefit their children.
The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.
BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.
Tax breaks are usually at the state level, towns get paid out, which is why so many towns were rubber stamping approvals so quickly.
That's aside from the build-out jobs.
Anyone who works anywhere close to data center build including construction, networking, sysadmin is cleaning up right now. Their wages have doubled and demand is huge.
Maybe it is 100 permanent jobs, but that's huge for a small community, and the thousands of temporary jobs make an impact, too.
But current prices typically assume powerful NIMBYs blocking new development.