America is so massive, these trillion dollar companies can surely build these out in the boonies with very few people around?
ETA: I would rather no data centers be built, but my point is if we have to, let’s minimize the number of people who are affected. Offer to move them if need be.
It's generally more expensive for them when it comes to things like power, water and internet.
Boonies have very poor in each of those and building it up would take too long so throw another in Northern Virginia since they have expensive access to additional of that but at least it will become operational.
It seems downright dishonest to focus so much on Loudon County VA, which is DC's major tech hub and has the highest median income of any county in the US. It is definitely dishonest to not mention any demographic or historical details.
No one ever cared about DCs before now. I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.
Ironically, There’s enough issues with the DC buildout going on that even with 100% public opinion support it would still be significantly delayed. The behind the meter power generation isn’t going well. There’s only so many gas fired turbines on the market. And connecting a DC to an established grid isn’t like clicking a button in AWS no matter how much money you have.
I made this comment a little bit ago, I'll share it again:
I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story.
Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.
Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town.
(On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)
Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.
They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
.. and are completely ignored. The mighty nimby seems to be very nimble as soon as economic interests are involved. Very strange.. i thought he was the mighty preventer of all things changing. Especially the plotholes.. eh potholes and buses and rail..
I agree that I don’t want a data center in my backyard either.
What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
I tried to look for one in my state and a few surrounding areas and couldn’t find any. There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
There was another story about a small town without any major electricity or communication infrastructure coming together to impose a moratorium on data center construction. There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all, but they felt so threatened that they needed to convene and put on a big show about banning it.
The social phenomenon of the data center construction protest movement is really fascinating. My assumption is that it will run its course and then be mostly dropped when the next current thing comes along.
There are some actual concerns about using natural gas instead of trying to utilize the optimal power sources or locations, but they’re mostly overshadowed by bogeyman complaints like thinking that a data center is going to end up in your backyard or water consumption that is negligible compared to golf courses and swimming pools.
> What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.
Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?
I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.
The newer ones are using on-site generators that are insanely loud and require multiples more power than datacenters have historically needed. For a rack with traditional servers with just RAM/CPU/Drives, 5kW is sufficient in most cases.
When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.
I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.
I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.
They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.
Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.
It's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs.
I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.
> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.
This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.
Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.
I find what people want from the data center build-out is pretty reasonable:
1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house.
2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid.
3. Don't burn the earth with CO2.
4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance.
5. Pay a lot of taxes.
But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.
What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters
1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles.
2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent.
3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good.
4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty.
5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.
Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.
I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.
It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.
IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards. Maybe those standards should rise to include ambient noise requirements, heat dissipation, capital contributions to water/electricity supply, additional tax burden points (for land use without, maybe?).
But I also feel there needs to be an assertion that if you own the land it's your property and you're free to do most things with it, safely and politely. This is about property rights and freedoms.
Rather than making everyone comply with the strictest noise and other restrictions of residential areas, it's much easier for everyone if you put industrial things in an industrial area and residences in a residential area.
> IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards.
NIMB is part of setting those standards.
In a nearby town, the city was planning on putting a moratorium on new data centers, and so a lot of companies rushed their application in before the moratorium start date. They all got approved. The local citizens got really mad that they were approved, and the city simply said "Look: We legally cannot deny them permits if they're conforming to current requirements."
So yes, you're right. And yes, your statement is mostly irrelevant. NIMBYism is always about the future requirements. It's not as if enacting a rule disallowing high density residences will force existing ones to be torn down.
The other day I was talking with two friends—one programmer, one musician, both of fairly conservative political persuasion—and the topic of “AI data centers” came up. I said something to the effect of, “y'know, all that talk about how they just use all up all the water from wherever they're built is total propaganda nonsense, right?” and both were genuinely taken aback by this statement. As far as they were concerned, “AI data centers” were something a Captain Planet villain would build, just absolute ecological disasters, inherently. I'm relatively neutral when it comes to this stuff but man, the propaganda against “AI data centers” really works!
You don't need to put in a lot of effort to convince people that creepy, deceitful, generally unlikable, rich folks are doing things you won't like and are lying to get away with it.
And the owner class has already trotted out the old Red Scare “If you don’t like datacenters, you’re just doing what China wants” bullshit has a defense.
I don't get the connection? The vast population has no care for eSports, yet known "esports stadiums". I'm not even sure what an 'eSport Stadium" is, most major esports events are held out of "traditional" venues.
I would flip my bitch switch if a datacenter was stood up near me, where I could hear it. I am on 5 acres in rural Michigan surrounded by peace and quiet. I specifically came here for this reason. At the same time, I understand that we need datacenters. And tbh, Michigan is under-served in this space (ex, most of my queries thru the Cloudflare network have to go to Chicago first), and I wish we had more. But not close to residential areas. Not on top of valuable farmland.
My wacky idea was that datacenters should be built on EPA superfund sites. It becomes a win-win. Datacenter gets land that humans cannot occupy, helps/funds partial cleanup, slaps a big ass concrete building down on top of the rest of the mess and kills two birds with one stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
>Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
> Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
Because it costs an order of magnitude more money to build underground or build a skyscraper than it does it build a precast concrete tilt-up warehouse.
You can build a single story warehouse building with as large of a floor plate as you want, it could be hundreds of square miles if you didn’t need any utilities inside of it. Obviously you do need utilities which limit the overall building size because of things like voltage drop, pump sizing, etc.
Excavating that much earth, building a concrete underground structure, and then covering it, or erecting a steel and concrete tower is much more work than having precast wall sections shipped in from the prefab plant which are then tilted into place with cranes and secured to the concrete slab foundation.
First thing missing from this "article" is a number indicating how many people don't want AI datacentres anywhere. You can't claim that someone is a NIMBY if their stance is that the damned thing shouldn't be built anywhere.
The datacenter outrage is mislabeled. It's actually zoning outrage, caused by local governments that aren't taking their citizen's concerns seriously. It just so happens that datacenters are the hottest (no pun intended) industrial construction option right now.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] threadETA: I would rather no data centers be built, but my point is if we have to, let’s minimize the number of people who are affected. Offer to move them if need be.
Boonies have very poor in each of those and building it up would take too long so throw another in Northern Virginia since they have expensive access to additional of that but at least it will become operational.
Ironically, There’s enough issues with the DC buildout going on that even with 100% public opinion support it would still be significantly delayed. The behind the meter power generation isn’t going well. There’s only so many gas fired turbines on the market. And connecting a DC to an established grid isn’t like clicking a button in AWS no matter how much money you have.
I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.
A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story.
This is a datacenter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 I doubt many people even know its a datacenter. Its pretty much any other office building.
This is also a datacenter. I imagine just about everyone living nearby knows its a datacenter. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6
Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.
Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town.
(On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)
Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.
They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.
Once a data center shows up, that plot of land is locked out of more productive development for decades.
What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.
I tried to look for one in my state and a few surrounding areas and couldn’t find any. There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.
There was another story about a small town without any major electricity or communication infrastructure coming together to impose a moratorium on data center construction. There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all, but they felt so threatened that they needed to convene and put on a big show about banning it.
The social phenomenon of the data center construction protest movement is really fascinating. My assumption is that it will run its course and then be mostly dropped when the next current thing comes along.
There are some actual concerns about using natural gas instead of trying to utilize the optimal power sources or locations, but they’re mostly overshadowed by bogeyman complaints like thinking that a data center is going to end up in your backyard or water consumption that is negligible compared to golf courses and swimming pools.
What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.
Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?
They simply take a lot of space, and the city gave sweet tax deals, and they employ almost no one. The locals aren't happy with that type of land use.
When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.
I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.
They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.
Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.
I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.
This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.
Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.
The AI data centers consume a lot more power, and thus generate a lot more heat(equals cooling noise) per square meter.
This is the reason why it's a new problem right now.
Edit: autocorrect used breasts instead of beasts.
1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house. 2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid. 3. Don't burn the earth with CO2. 4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance. 5. Pay a lot of taxes.
But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.
What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters
1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles. 2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent. 3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good. 4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty. 5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.
Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.
It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.
But I also feel there needs to be an assertion that if you own the land it's your property and you're free to do most things with it, safely and politely. This is about property rights and freedoms.
NIMB is part of setting those standards.
In a nearby town, the city was planning on putting a moratorium on new data centers, and so a lot of companies rushed their application in before the moratorium start date. They all got approved. The local citizens got really mad that they were approved, and the city simply said "Look: We legally cannot deny them permits if they're conforming to current requirements."
So yes, you're right. And yes, your statement is mostly irrelevant. NIMBYism is always about the future requirements. It's not as if enacting a rule disallowing high density residences will force existing ones to be torn down.
How purposely they are doing this is unclear, but they have the motive and means.
Let your biggest rival shoot themselves in the foot over the most important technology potentially ever, is a great strategy.
My wacky idea was that datacenters should be built on EPA superfund sites. It becomes a win-win. Datacenter gets land that humans cannot occupy, helps/funds partial cleanup, slaps a big ass concrete building down on top of the rest of the mess and kills two birds with one stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).
It's cheaper this way.
Because it costs an order of magnitude more money to build underground or build a skyscraper than it does it build a precast concrete tilt-up warehouse.
You can build a single story warehouse building with as large of a floor plate as you want, it could be hundreds of square miles if you didn’t need any utilities inside of it. Obviously you do need utilities which limit the overall building size because of things like voltage drop, pump sizing, etc.
Excavating that much earth, building a concrete underground structure, and then covering it, or erecting a steel and concrete tower is much more work than having precast wall sections shipped in from the prefab plant which are then tilted into place with cranes and secured to the concrete slab foundation.
I'm not saying they should want a data center in their backyard but headline wise "not in my backyard" is true of almost everything.