Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.
1. The 2 reactors under construction [1 > CONSTRUCTION] are expected to take 20 years and >20 years respectively [2][3].
2. Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told a parliamentary inquiry that "Japan's atomic safety rules are inferior to global standards and left the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster". There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese nuclear power companies. [4 (Bloomberg: "Nuclear Safety Chief Says Lax Rules Led to Fukushima Crisis")]
3. Additionally, your source is from more than 5 years ago; in those additional >5 years, neither of the 2 under-construction Japan plants (started in 2006 and 2010) have finished, and 1 is not expected until 2030 (I couldn't find an expected date for the other).
4. The phase you mentioned is a relatively small amount (~1/3) of a nuclear reactor's total startup timeline. [6]
5. Japan was the fastest country from your 2021 source (before taking into account that current JP builds are taking 20+ years).
6. The last Japan reactor to go online was in the 2000s [1 > OPERATION].
Japan learned from Fukishima nuclear accident, and many outside Japan forget that earthquake and tsunami had bigger impact in terms of material damage and cost of life then the nuclear accident.
Currently, economy of Japan (world biggest LNG importer) is hit hard by the events in Middle East. Because of this goverment starts maximum use of nuclear power policy.
That may be true, but does not change that the only 2 JP reactors built since the 2000s are each taking 2+ decades each to complete (started in 2006 and 2010, and estimated to launch in ___ and 2030).
Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.
I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.
No a big part is that the buildings are ugly and transform the character of a place that folks grew up in. Maybe focus should be put on beautifying these buildings in some way
Even if invisible they would not be a popular neighbour because they are a very overt reminder to the poor people around them how uneven the wealth and political power distribution is between them and the tech exec owners?
They should be popular - they pay property taxes to the local schools without taking much from the community at all. (note that I'm coming out against the all too common tax breaks that they get to build in your city)
They should be underground (that’s not shockingly expensive at the scale we talk about) and a net green-energy-driven power producer which they give away for free and pay property taxes. The list of things they could do that would be a cheap 1-2% of the total build and running costs to soften it are long.
> They should be underground (that’s not shockingly expensive at the scale we talk about)
... I'm not sure you realize the size of a modern hyperscale datacenter? They're pretty dang big.
The amount of earthmoving to bury one would also be awful for the environment. There's really no need to complicate it that much, they're big warehouses full of computers, just shove them on some unused industrial land somewhere as is already being done.
They should be required to pay for new renewable generation, I agree. That much is common sense.
Sure, that's much more feasible, but there's no real point. We don't do this for any other kind of industrial infrastructure (except the kind that HAS to go in residential areas, like utility substations). It's like the ultimate first world problem, spending money and gas on earthmoving so that the few dozen people who might occasionally drive past this thing can glance at a grassy berm instead of a concrete wall.
I don’t see how they are any uglier than any other industrial facility. That’s really what these are and it’s how they should be viewed. Typically most people don’t want to live next door to a factory, but there are some places where it’s appropriate to build them, often remote land or former industrial sites (brownfields) where you don’t want housing due to previous contamination.
People in my area are complaining about data centers being built in rural fields and on former aluminum plant and power plant sites. The debate has become pretty detached from reality. What remains rooted in reality mostly comes down to electric bills / power consumption and the fact that, as everyone is saying, it's the only way for people to push back against big tech billionaires.
I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.
People should stop citing that paper. It makes the opposite point they think it makes. I think most people just read the first couple of sentences in the abstract.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The former would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth, especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
You misunderstood I think. They aren't arguing water is a bigger problem than energy. They are arguing that negative perception is mostly focused around water use.
it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.
There is a methodical issue with that study that the authors acknowledge.
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
> In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears,
where I am the water is a part of it, but a big issue is electricity prices going up (which they will)
Well I don't have the data in front of me, but building power capacity leads to higher capacity payments, which are passed to all consumers. This has been an global industry standard for decades at far as I know.
The study's authors acknowledge it in the text.
> We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach.
Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal. People are sick of tech companies bribing their way out of any accountability.
> A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power huge datacenters in Tennessee.
> xAI has been fighting for a year and a half over truck-sized gas turbines the company had parked near its Colossus 1 and 2 facilities, arguing to local authorities that the electricity-generating turbines were exempt from requirements for air quality permits.
Not necessarily, some places build gas turbine generators, but these cause the noise that neighbors complain about. Gas isn’t as bad about pollution (except CO2) but you don’t want to live next door to a plant either.
It’s hard to discuss because different facilities have different configurations, and the local impact depends on that plus local characteristics.
Given the externalities of large facilities like this, impacted neighbors should definitely get a vote. Maybe we need a standard to define the impact radius based on the facility characteristics. This would add transparency and make it easier for people to decide without FUD and distortion. Unfortunately I don’t have much confidence in anyone coming up with such a standard without altering it to benefit their side, now that it’s become a political football.
In part due to rising global prices of energy resources, which affect local markets and non-oil markets due to the (partial) fungibility of energy and the global nature of marketplaces.
And if they can't give capacity, they should maybe be required to give a kind of "call option" or hedge locals energy prices linked to regular inflation.
Northern Virginia has tons of data centers because it had massive amounts of excess energy capacity.
That is now being consumed and now Loudon County will also start engaging in electricity price wars with data centers. New regulations to segregate markets is supposed to kick in on Jan 1 2027, in fact.
There's also the water usage, which time and time again they lie blatantly about, and they choose to want to often build these things in heavily populated drought-stressed areas for some foolish reason. And then you got clowns like Musk wantin' to build 'em entirely powered by dirty generators instead of any form of clean energy (which, I mean, if you're buildin' in drought-stressed sunny areas, why not some variant of solar, right?).
Just a man on the street here—I sense it's more a backlash against tech-bros in general. People are seeing the world getting worse from tech and they're taking their pitchforks to the data centers and Flock cameras.
Not to disagree, but I suspect there wouldn't be such a backlash if the same people were building parks/forests/playgrounds etc. There are valid issues around datacentres although they might be getting bad press because of their association with tech-bros.
So not the massive Chinese bot farm (200K +) launching anti-datacenter propaganda campaigns? It's just the green energy concern? ("Spiking local prices" was one of the propaganda talking points.)
These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.
There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.
Also Sam, Dario et al have been constantly (like literally, every single week at least) been telling us that AI is going to make all of us unemployable and have to live on welfare.
Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?
The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
They've fired up the same irrational hordes that brought us flat earthing, anti-vax, and 5G Covid. It's just another parade of extreme ignorance. And yes, the SF crowd is comically oblivious to what they're dealing with, ivory tower style.
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
Opposition to AI data centers is completely rational, which is why both liberal and conservative folks are against it. These data centers are being forced on communities with soon-to-be-former leaders agreeing to nondisclosure agreements. They raise electricity prices. They are being slapped together with poor water recycling, and noisy diesel generators that pollute. The data centers for AI use a lot more resources than traditional ones. And the tech oligarchs think they can ram rush these things through, but they can't. People are sick of the lack of transparency. They're doing it all wrong to save a buck and a minute.
The comparisons to anti-vax and flat earth are absurd.
And what exactly is the benefit to you to having a data centre specifically in the area you live? Seems to me that far from “irrational hordes”, the protestors are standing up for their interests above the interests of the AI companies.
But the question shouldn't be, do you want datacentres or not? Datacentres are gonna be built in China or elsewhere.
The question should be, do you prefer to have them also built in the US or do you agree to have China (or another country) controlling AI in the future?
If AI is really gonna make everyone unemployable, then it seems to me like you would want them to be built in your country, not in another country, especially not one you disagree with.
Of course they're still the question of where exactly there are built and how to compensate for the nuisances they may bring.
> The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
I wonder if their target audience with those comments is the government, basically setting up OpenAI/Anthropic as "too big to fail" in the sense that "if AI is _inevitably_ going to take away everyone's jobs, then we'd better make sure that it's US AI and not Chinese AI or some "rogue AI" that's doing it, and the government should 1) be in bed with us, 2) provide a financial backstop, and 3) not regulate us or put on the brakes so that we can stay ahead of the Chinese.
They don't care what the "normal" American thinks.
Companies are content to charge more in the short term to pay for the upgrades on the backs of the current subscribers as opposed to just charging the people for whom the extra load is desired.
Then these big buyers go ahead and pay 50% of what everyone else is paying.
> When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike
Why is that?
Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live.
I've been to a data center before due to work and my impression of the place was really good. It's kinda invisible from the outside, everything is extremely clean. There's no noise on the outside and the excess heat is used to get people cheap warm water or something like that.
I'm quite confused why people suddenly hate on them. Feels like I'm missing a whole lot of context.
So you can't just build things in Germany. Even if you just want to build a structure on your property. You need to get government approval first. Which can take years.
You won't get approval if whatever you want to build would impact things that way, meaning before you can build or even expand something like a data center you have to make sure the capacity is there or pay yourself to build it or pay to get a direct line from outside the city. Either way, other people won't need to pay more because of it.
> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production
I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.
I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.
And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.
Residents of the state should get money for needing to live next to data centers and the use of their land/natural resources/etc, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund.
There's lots of AI capex that is low risk. If it ends up being under utilized companies like Amazon and Google will adjust their capex plans. When they say things like under spending is riskier than overspending, for them, that's plausible.
But the sketchiest part of the bubble is when you directly bolt a no name data center company to Nvidia's cash pile, and you start turning cash into ever-lengthening receivables collection time, that's why people are skeptical of data centers: even if they can't tell a Google data center from a pivoting crypto bros data center, they smell the bullshit.
People also know they are being lied to, Oracle claims their New Mexico data center will run on Bloom fuel cells. I doubt Bloom is ready to scale to data center size without proof of concept in different applications at large if not directly comparable scale.
The intense anti-DC sentiment shouldn't be surprising - NIMBYism is the only viable mechanism available to people in the US. It doesn't matter if you're worried about Glonzo or have real concerns, they must be expressed in NIMBY terms in order to be heard.
For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.
As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc.
I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.
The older I get the more and more convinced I become that the media is the actual real enemy of the country. Their lifeblood is creating controversy and drama about everything so they can show ads. So insane that so few call them out (probably because most people are already "captured" by them).
> As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims.
But have they disproportionately amplified them? I follow some energy experts, and the consensus for AI-focused mega-datacenters seems to be "no". Some interesting reports:
I remember the fracking roll out here. The companies involved directly handed checks to local residents, promised to train locals for new jobs, paid to fund schools, and so on.
These companies have a lot of money behind them - if they're not willing to put in the effort to convince local residents that the data center will be good for them, I feel like that's on them. They could easily do some handouts and fix this. Offer to pay extra taxes to the state or whatever, fund a new power plant, pay everyone who lives nearby the DC some thousands of dollars, whatever.
If people were just honest with their objections, then we could be unified, but currently we're fighting misinformation that are trying to stop 5MW computer closets and projects that are trying to be a drop in replacement for a _steel mill_ (which should be an automatic approval)
People don't want the billionaires coming into your town and having their way with it, the one you live in and are supposed to get a say in how things are done. This is not difficult to understand.
You tell everyone AI is going to put them out of a job and then you’re surprised when working class communities say “no, please leave” when folks want to build a data center in their back yard.
There are times when Silicon Valley looks out of touch and there are times when Silicon Valley just looks like idiots with hubris. This is more the later.
1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];
2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and
3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].
All of this is relevant here.
The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.
So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.
So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.
This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.
Anyone who has never lived next to a data center is commentating on the side lines without experience about what it’s actually like.
Lots of these commentaries miss the following:
- noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging
- rises costs of power and water
- more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns
The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.
And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.
I can actually speak to this as someone in ruralish Pennsylvania whose town is going through one of these backlashes pretty heavily.
The major issue, at least in my neighborhood, is location more than anything else. We have a lot of industrially zoned areas that are great for data center location, and where they could be surrounded by other established industrial builds (think soda bottling plants, warehouses, transportation depos, semiconductor fabs, etc.) All the infrastructure is built out, electricity needs, etc. There is also a ton of land that exists that could be used for this purpose pretty distantly from town centers, if you can convince the gov/owners to part with it.
But despite this, the folks who want to expand data centers are instead trying to push instead into residential areas, or otherwise on land that would basically butt you up against pre-existing neighborhoods. Where I lack insight is if it's a matter of industrial property being too expensive compared to the swathes of otherwise unused land (at least that isn't used for state forests or whatnot,) or if there just literally is no room available for what they want to build out. But all the aspects of having bought your land to be in a residential area suddenly become way busy, value might go down because it's now in this weird quasi-industrial zone.
While there are legitimate concerns about the electricity/water usage, I (tinfoil hat) think that this is more of a game of influence/propaganda/state-level interest in an subject where it's easy to sow seeds of dissent. I personally think the electricity/water thing is a concern on a bigger scale than just individual utility bills, but it's blown out of proportion under that guise by conveniently cherry picking data from extreme examples. I also (more tinfoil) think that there's a lot of money changing hands since the AI boom is still growing and people are desperate to try to make a buck asap in any way possible, regardless of what may come tomorrow, so they're more willing to make a profit off of everything, but I have no legitimate proof of this.
Everyone against data centers is doing cost-benefit analysis. If the data center folks want to solve this, work on that ratio. And both sides, if you please, since the perceived benefit right now is basically zero.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadhttps://x.com/GrantChalmers/status/1422472474487263233
2. Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told a parliamentary inquiry that "Japan's atomic safety rules are inferior to global standards and left the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster". There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese nuclear power companies. [4 (Bloomberg: "Nuclear Safety Chief Says Lax Rules Led to Fukushima Crisis")]
3. Additionally, your source is from more than 5 years ago; in those additional >5 years, neither of the 2 under-construction Japan plants (started in 2006 and 2010) have finished, and 1 is not expected until 2030 (I couldn't find an expected date for the other).
4. The phase you mentioned is a relatively small amount (~1/3) of a nuclear reactor's total startup timeline. [6]
5. Japan was the fastest country from your 2021 source (before taking into account that current JP builds are taking 20+ years).
6. The last Japan reactor to go online was in the 2000s [1 > OPERATION].
[1] https://cnpp.iaea.org/public/countries/JP/profile/preview
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cma_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://pris-stats.iaea.org/reactor/862
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-16/nuclear-s...
[5] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-timeline-of-a-nu...
Currently, economy of Japan (world biggest LNG importer) is hit hard by the events in Middle East. Because of this goverment starts maximum use of nuclear power policy.
https://www.nucnet.org/news/japan-council-adopts-policy-pack...
https://www.powermag.com/reactor-restart-rekindling-japans-n...
https://ieefa.org/resources/japans-diversified-lng-procureme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cma_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://pris-stats.iaea.org/reactor/862
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
* Externality costs for items like pollution
* Any required insurance cost during their lifetime (not subsidized)
* An up-front bond or similar to cover final decommissioning and any required long-term storage costs (again, for fossil/renewable/nuclear)
Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.
I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.
About time.
... I'm not sure you realize the size of a modern hyperscale datacenter? They're pretty dang big.
The amount of earthmoving to bury one would also be awful for the environment. There's really no need to complicate it that much, they're big warehouses full of computers, just shove them on some unused industrial land somewhere as is already being done.
They should be required to pay for new renewable generation, I agree. That much is common sense.
In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.
"We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach."
But the data center backlash really started 2 years ago. It's 2026 now. Getting new energy generation built and approved takes time.
"We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect."
There it is.
Monthly private spending on data center construction:
2015: $168 million
2024: $1.59 billion
10x increase over 9 years
2026: $4.36 billion
3x increase over 2 years
Let me reiterate: MONTHLY spending.
Compound this with presumably we've gotten better and not worse at building data centers (if nothing else, just building larger data centers would create economies of scale), the construction dollar to power consumption ratio has probably moved in the wrong direction for your argument.
The former would conceivably encourage more consistent usage of baseload and, where insufficient, gradual construction of additional supply. That would have the expected effect as seen in the paper.
The latter growth, especially after an extended period of the former growth, would not necessarily do this. We in fact know this to be true because the rate-limiting step on data center construction is lack of energy.
So obviously there is not ample excess baseload just sitting around. Obviously it's non-trivial to add additional capacity at the speed data centers need it.
it's my power bill, dude. and everyone else's around me. your paper stops measuring that data right at the time when everyone's bills started increasing sharply.
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...
where I am the water is a part of it, but a big issue is electricity prices going up (which they will)
The study's authors acknowledge it in the text.
> We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach.
This is a good primer on capacity payments: https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/post/capacity-payment
Yeah, Elon's a big fan of this tactic.
> A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power huge datacenters in Tennessee.
> xAI has been fighting for a year and a half over truck-sized gas turbines the company had parked near its Colossus 1 and 2 facilities, arguing to local authorities that the electricity-generating turbines were exempt from requirements for air quality permits.
It’s hard to discuss because different facilities have different configurations, and the local impact depends on that plus local characteristics.
Given the externalities of large facilities like this, impacted neighbors should definitely get a vote. Maybe we need a standard to define the impact radius based on the facility characteristics. This would add transparency and make it easier for people to decide without FUD and distortion. Unfortunately I don’t have much confidence in anyone coming up with such a standard without altering it to benefit their side, now that it’s become a political football.
Also, I live in Northern Virginia where we have tons of data centers, and energy prices have not spiked.
That is now being consumed and now Loudon County will also start engaging in electricity price wars with data centers. New regulations to segregate markets is supposed to kick in on Jan 1 2027, in fact.
But also, it seems to have increased in price quite a bit lately.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS35A72610
(Of course I might simply be projecting.)
These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.
There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.
> These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity
And now you've got all the noise and pollution from that to deal with.
The outside agitators are in the news. The U.S. just happens to be a little more vulnerable to "straight to the people" propaganda campaigns.
Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?
The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
And what exactly is the benefit to you to having a data centre specifically in the area you live? Seems to me that far from “irrational hordes”, the protestors are standing up for their interests above the interests of the AI companies.
The question should be, do you prefer to have them also built in the US or do you agree to have China (or another country) controlling AI in the future?
If AI is really gonna make everyone unemployable, then it seems to me like you would want them to be built in your country, not in another country, especially not one you disagree with.
Of course they're still the question of where exactly there are built and how to compensate for the nuisances they may bring.
I wonder if their target audience with those comments is the government, basically setting up OpenAI/Anthropic as "too big to fail" in the sense that "if AI is _inevitably_ going to take away everyone's jobs, then we'd better make sure that it's US AI and not Chinese AI or some "rogue AI" that's doing it, and the government should 1) be in bed with us, 2) provide a financial backstop, and 3) not regulate us or put on the brakes so that we can stay ahead of the Chinese.
They don't care what the "normal" American thinks.
Then these big buyers go ahead and pay 50% of what everyone else is paying.
Why is that?
Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live.
I've been to a data center before due to work and my impression of the place was really good. It's kinda invisible from the outside, everything is extremely clean. There's no noise on the outside and the excess heat is used to get people cheap warm water or something like that.
I'm quite confused why people suddenly hate on them. Feels like I'm missing a whole lot of context.
Infrastructure requires new capacity to be build, which requires capacity payments.
You won't get approval if whatever you want to build would impact things that way, meaning before you can build or even expand something like a data center you have to make sure the capacity is there or pay yourself to build it or pay to get a direct line from outside the city. Either way, other people won't need to pay more because of it.
I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.
I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.
And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.
But the sketchiest part of the bubble is when you directly bolt a no name data center company to Nvidia's cash pile, and you start turning cash into ever-lengthening receivables collection time, that's why people are skeptical of data centers: even if they can't tell a Google data center from a pivoting crypto bros data center, they smell the bullshit.
People also know they are being lied to, Oracle claims their New Mexico data center will run on Bloom fuel cells. I doubt Bloom is ready to scale to data center size without proof of concept in different applications at large if not directly comparable scale.
For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.
I haven't seen people really care and mobilize since maybe BLM?
The only lever the government seems to have is tax breaks, and the only lever the people seem to have is NIMBYism. What a joke.
I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.
But have they disproportionately amplified them? I follow some energy experts, and the consensus for AI-focused mega-datacenters seems to be "no". Some interesting reports:
• Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI's Environmental and Human Effects - https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107172
• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission): "…approximately half of this [$5.1 billion] cost will be borne by customers…" - https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/commissioner-clements-...
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas: Processing Power: The Effect of Data Centers on Wholesale Electricity Markets - https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/...
These companies have a lot of money behind them - if they're not willing to put in the effort to convince local residents that the data center will be good for them, I feel like that's on them. They could easily do some handouts and fix this. Offer to pay extra taxes to the state or whatever, fund a new power plant, pay everyone who lives nearby the DC some thousands of dollars, whatever.
If people were just honest with their objections, then we could be unified, but currently we're fighting misinformation that are trying to stop 5MW computer closets and projects that are trying to be a drop in replacement for a _steel mill_ (which should be an automatic approval)
Can we put them on Mars, and maybe send Elon to tend them?
There are times when Silicon Valley looks out of touch and there are times when Silicon Valley just looks like idiots with hubris. This is more the later.
1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];
2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and
3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].
All of this is relevant here.
The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.
So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.
So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.
This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/
[3]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
Lots of these commentaries miss the following: - noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging - rises costs of power and water - more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns
The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.
And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.
Regardless hopefully this restarts nuclear power generation
The major issue, at least in my neighborhood, is location more than anything else. We have a lot of industrially zoned areas that are great for data center location, and where they could be surrounded by other established industrial builds (think soda bottling plants, warehouses, transportation depos, semiconductor fabs, etc.) All the infrastructure is built out, electricity needs, etc. There is also a ton of land that exists that could be used for this purpose pretty distantly from town centers, if you can convince the gov/owners to part with it.
But despite this, the folks who want to expand data centers are instead trying to push instead into residential areas, or otherwise on land that would basically butt you up against pre-existing neighborhoods. Where I lack insight is if it's a matter of industrial property being too expensive compared to the swathes of otherwise unused land (at least that isn't used for state forests or whatnot,) or if there just literally is no room available for what they want to build out. But all the aspects of having bought your land to be in a residential area suddenly become way busy, value might go down because it's now in this weird quasi-industrial zone.
While there are legitimate concerns about the electricity/water usage, I (tinfoil hat) think that this is more of a game of influence/propaganda/state-level interest in an subject where it's easy to sow seeds of dissent. I personally think the electricity/water thing is a concern on a bigger scale than just individual utility bills, but it's blown out of proportion under that guise by conveniently cherry picking data from extreme examples. I also (more tinfoil) think that there's a lot of money changing hands since the AI boom is still growing and people are desperate to try to make a buck asap in any way possible, regardless of what may come tomorrow, so they're more willing to make a profit off of everything, but I have no legitimate proof of this.