“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation”
When are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
These datacenters will likely be hastily abandoned once the AI-flavored expansion pops and will be a blight on the land that would have otherwise been growing beans and corn.
At best, they will be a poorly guarded structure that local high school students will break into and do what high school students do.
>“I assumed Republicans would be for this: business, deregulation,”
AI Data Centers are different than other plants. They provide very little in employment in the region. The few high-paying jobs that may exist can be located in other countries. All that is needed is building maintenance, and that can be contracted out, so no permanent work for the area.
All the Data Center does is use resources, electricity/water, without giving anything back to the community except discounted property tax. The residences, they only see higher utility costs for themselves.
If you're not around rural America a lot, it can be hard to believe how deeply, at an existential level, ideas like those conveyed by a Gadsden flag are held. Rural Americans really, really do not like being told what to do, by anyone, regardless of whether the person in power's mascot is an elephant or an ass.
It is not surprising in the least that suits from Washington and execs from Silicon Valley descending upon the land like vultures aren't exactly given a warm welcome from regular folk. Even if electricity prices stayed the same there would be damage done that goes beyond NIMBYism that would need to be fixed.
This article seems like more of at attempt on the part of the Wall Street Journal and the prestige media memeplex it represents to characterize AI as harmful and unpopular - particularly unpopular among rural Trump voters - than it is reporting on organic rural opposition to data centers being built. It's heavy on quotes from think tank people, community organizers who clearly talk about rural Republicans as an outgroup, polticians making relatively bland statements, etc., who are talking about AI being bad in a general sense or talking in a meta way about rural opposition to datacenters being a phenomenon that exists. It doesn't have much reporting on local people specifically objecting to data centers near them, or any indication of how many people actually object to this.
My own thinking is that the prestige media memeplex really hates AI and has a big problem with silicon valley tech companies, and this colors all their reporting about AI datacenters. See for instance https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake, and https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use..., particularly the parts about prestige media journalist Karen Hao getting the amount of water datacenters use wrong by multiple orders of magnitude in order to make AI datacenters seem like a problem. Plenty of people who clearly hate the concept of AI also throw around "datacenter water use" as a general attack against AI, completely thoughtlessly.
I strongly suspect that the prestige media journalists Anvee Bhutani and Amrith Ramkumar who wrote this article are doing something similar. Are there really significant numbers of people in rural areas who object to a thousand-acre data center project? That's not that big in a rural farmland context.
The one thing that strikes me as something rural people might organically care about is if the presence of a data center near them appreciably raises their power bills or makes the local electric grid less reliable. Data centers really do use a lot of electricity, and that's the specific issue the Republican Missouri senator was quoted as addressing. Still, if power bills are actually going up in a way that meaningfully affects people, it shouldn't be hard to find quotes from people who have seen their power bills go up. Increased local energy cost should be the focus of this entire article if that is in fact a problem, and I'm suspicious of the fact that it isn't.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] threadWhen are we going to stop talking about Republicans like they are still neocons? Republicans haven’t been the pro big-business party in 10 years (did we forget about the tariffs, trade wars, etc that have happened in the last year alone?)
These datacenters will likely be hastily abandoned once the AI-flavored expansion pops and will be a blight on the land that would have otherwise been growing beans and corn.
At best, they will be a poorly guarded structure that local high school students will break into and do what high school students do.
AI Data Centers are different than other plants. They provide very little in employment in the region. The few high-paying jobs that may exist can be located in other countries. All that is needed is building maintenance, and that can be contracted out, so no permanent work for the area.
All the Data Center does is use resources, electricity/water, without giving anything back to the community except discounted property tax. The residences, they only see higher utility costs for themselves.
So no wonder people are fighting back.
It is not surprising in the least that suits from Washington and execs from Silicon Valley descending upon the land like vultures aren't exactly given a warm welcome from regular folk. Even if electricity prices stayed the same there would be damage done that goes beyond NIMBYism that would need to be fixed.
My own thinking is that the prestige media memeplex really hates AI and has a big problem with silicon valley tech companies, and this colors all their reporting about AI datacenters. See for instance https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake, and https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use..., particularly the parts about prestige media journalist Karen Hao getting the amount of water datacenters use wrong by multiple orders of magnitude in order to make AI datacenters seem like a problem. Plenty of people who clearly hate the concept of AI also throw around "datacenter water use" as a general attack against AI, completely thoughtlessly.
I strongly suspect that the prestige media journalists Anvee Bhutani and Amrith Ramkumar who wrote this article are doing something similar. Are there really significant numbers of people in rural areas who object to a thousand-acre data center project? That's not that big in a rural farmland context.
The one thing that strikes me as something rural people might organically care about is if the presence of a data center near them appreciably raises their power bills or makes the local electric grid less reliable. Data centers really do use a lot of electricity, and that's the specific issue the Republican Missouri senator was quoted as addressing. Still, if power bills are actually going up in a way that meaningfully affects people, it shouldn't be hard to find quotes from people who have seen their power bills go up. Increased local energy cost should be the focus of this entire article if that is in fact a problem, and I'm suspicious of the fact that it isn't.