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.
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.
We live in a system wherein our survival is gate kept by oligopolistic technology, energy, and health insurance corporations.
One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.
Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.
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.
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.
I'm curious how you can square spreading infrastructure/housing around with the impact of climate change. It seems like the answer through that lens is to drive sustainable urban planning, not to move further towards suburban sprawl & car-centric culture.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Democrats have participated in previous bailouts, I don't see why they wouldn't participate in this one. Especially given that the "it" in your "let it burn" scenario isn't AI companies, it's the economy.
The Republican party has changed so much since 2008 it's almost unrecognizable. Don't assume that the current Democratic party is the same as it was then.
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.
Natural gas power production is by far the cleanest and most available for this use case. Nuclear would be better but can't be brought online fast enough. Solar/Wind would be best but there's not enough yet either and behind the meter generation isn't even feasible. All things considered, natural gas is the best fit.
> Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began
That's because before the AI race began (1) no one was trying to build more data centers in a couple years than had previously been built in the entire history of civilization, and (2) the new data centers are an order of magnitude bigger than pre-AI race data centers.
Also (3) the people involved in those data centers were not also constantly bragging that they would use the data centers to replace everyone's job guy for pennies on the dollar.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> Weird place for a lefty to come in. Top comment thread are center-left, you're deep in the right/libertarian end of a centrist comment thread?
Weird place to come in and dissuade discussions between differing view points. This is at the root of our difficulty in finding compromise and ending the hyperbolic extremes on the left and right.
> I disagree violently with Acemoglu on free speech
In what sense? What is your perspective on his perspective and why it is wrong?
My gaps with Acemoglu et al re: "Building Pro-Worker Ai" is that there is handwaving at how we incentivize augmentation over full automation, and how new jobs and tasks are created.
"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”
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.
>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.
Off the top of my head, copywriters, PR researchers, graphic designers, marketers, tutors.
This is the doublespeak that has the public so distrustful: value companies at billions and trillions of dollars based primarily on their ability to replace your workforce, then tell the workforce there will be no displacement. It's insults the intelligence of reasonable people.
Example; my son’s teacher uses AI to make new reading material (mostly graphics), he’s pretty good at keeping quality up and making things relevant to the kids’ real life. But critically without AI, he would not have otherwise hired an illustrator, this is wholesale new economic activity. Not a replacement.
Outside of marketing hype, this is what is mostly happening across the economy. No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
>No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
I don't really know what this means. If you need a concrete example, just look at Figma's product roadmap. Look at Fiverr. Your son's teacher is, generally, replacing demand for an educational product with direct production. There was a whole supply chain being replaced with an inference vendor. If you're saying that kind of production doesn't also use generative art, I think you're being very selective.
Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement. The explanation of job market contraction is also replacement. The electorate are responding in their own interests to what they are being told.
“ Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement”
That’s a headline read of the situation on the ground is what I’m saying. The frontline is a lot more complex than just a 1-to-1 replacement.
My sons teacher still regularly uses library books (that regularly buys published books), now he can just add a story about his cats visiting the firehouse, cats the kids have met, hyper personalized and made more relevant, a market created totally new and replacing nothing in place.
Figma is on a hiring spree, just FYI, to drive my point home. This is pure pie growth.
On the ground, I have definitely replaced peoples' income with AI spend. If you haven't, or aren't even aware of it having happened, I think we're coming from meaningfully different places.
Company with a growing market got a productivity improving technology and decided to reduce their headcount? That seems...counter productive.
Short-termism is always a thing I guess, but these companies just end up hiring different (who can use the AI better) people down the line, which is in line with my conclusion.
> 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.
> 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.
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 very 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 on basic inspection, you should absolutely expect the exact opposite. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor and entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive wages 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.
Let me translate this for how a person negatively affected by this is going to see what you're saying:
'We are regularly deceptive and unadulteratedly self interested. Now we're going to create a catastrophic problem for you, one that is reasonably likely to be unprecedented in scale, because we deem it to be profitable for us. But don't worry, we promise to throw you a bone in the future to make it a bit more tolerable. Deal?'
I can generally see any genuine viewpoint relatively easily, but I'm having a lot of differently understanding what could possibly lead you to view things like this. Do you genuinely not see that LLMs are very likely to cause significant damage to all forms of cognitive employment?
This outcome is exactly what's driving the multi-trillion dollar valuations. The idea is that companies will be able to eliminate much of their labor and replace it with LLMs, LLM companies will rug-pull and investors get rich(er). A nice way of phrasing this is 'increasing the productivity' of companies' remaining labor forces, but it's the same outcome regardless of framing.
My optimism comes from what happens after this, but there's a high probability of rough waters on the horizon for a very large chunk of the labor force, before we enter into a new equilibrium. Trying to imagine things are just going to stay roughly the same is, in my opinion, just not a realistic view at all, almost regardless of the assumptions you make.
And given how non-independent society is now a days, shaking things up like this will likely have an unprecedented impact, even if the shaking was probably more severe from previous revolutionary leaps.
I don’t deny the transition is rough, difficult and panic inducing . What I ask is for those of us who have historical perspective, we understand that this is just another productivity jump in a chain of many since the Industrial Revolution and that categorically over a decade we will all collectively be wealthier as has been proven time and again. There is zero evidence that “this time is different” just because it’s cognitive activities being automated.
With this historic perspective we know we’ve gotten through this before and we can do better this time. More generous unemployment benefits, better retraining methods, these are all on the table.
What we shouldn’t do is give in to panic populism. We live in a representative democracy not a direct one precisely so representatives can balance the needs for growth, innovation and real across the board wealth creation over a more popular stagnant jobs program.
Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well.
You're all over the place. So right now you're agreeing that there will be a catastrophe which will be 'rough, difficult, and panic inducing.' And this is what people want to avoid, especially when the short-term to mid-term solution comes down to a mixture of relying on big tech and big government. I refuse to believe that you can't understand why people would do anything to avoid this. The companies deploying these buildings certainly do. There's a reason that a substantial chunk of the jobs created by datacenters involve guns!
I'm not trying to play gotchas. I'm trying to figure out what in the world your logic is and you seem to keep shifting it every single post. So now you're back to claiming it's nothing but defacto hysteria while in the post prior you were acknowledging that there would be widespread rough and difficult times, significant disruption to employment, and more.
Assuming you're human, this makes me think that you don't actually have any logic for your position and are instead ad hoc formulating an argument after picking a desired conclusion, rather than logically working your way to a conclusion.
It's not that complicated, if you see all help from the government as a "big government intervention" then yes, the thing you are panicking about will come true.
I don't think most people see it this way, and if we can expand government help (esp at the municipal and state levels), then the thing people are panicking about need not come true.
I just don't think you're engaging in good faith. You're now calling people getting forced out of their jobs and onto various government assistance programs a 'career upgrade' that's nothing to worry about. That's so absurdly out of touch that I refuse to believe anybody genuinely believes this.
I literally said retraining (you know..to get the upgrade).
Don’t think I’m the one arguing in bad faith.
Quoting myself again
“Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well. The real catastrophe would have been banning electricity distribution grids even though that’s what the rioting (see: “panicking”) lamplighters demanded”
I'm only engaged with what you're arguing. The problem is that it keeps overtly changing from post to post, often in mutually exclusive ways. And now you're leaning heavily into completely absurd euphemisms. Nobody's getting a career upgrade from this, let alone because of government programs. That's akin to telling coal miners go to learn to code. And again I refuse to believe any human would believe this.
Most of every humans knows that the issue for coal miners was not about better tools, but about their job being made obsolete, similar as what LLMs are already starting to do, and will likely do to a much greater degree in the future. Coal miners didn't become 'coal extraction machine operators' - they became unemployed.
Countless lives were completely destroyed in spite of 'government retraining' promises. Those who carried on managed to do through some menial labor and other jobs, many with even worse conditions and for worse pay. For instance trucking was a fairly common new profession - where you're away from family pretty much all the time, and getting paid even less. It's a horrible job, but it's the sort of work that was left for them.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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,
For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.
Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.
Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.
Does economic growth look like companies firing hundreds or thousands of employees in batches because they are replacing them with AI? Because that's what people are seeing in headlines. That and mass surveillance.
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.
>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.
Silicon Valley and it's kool-aid chugging autists have fucked America in the ass one time too many, methinks.
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 :)
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
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
The posturing from AI executives has been this will destroy labor. Whether or not that actually happens doesn’t matter - that’s their stance, their dream. They say it basically every chance they get.
Why, then, would average people want to help the people who very plainly state they are against them? It makes no sense.
Everyone here is shocked that average people aren’t willingly to obviously advocate against themselves. Uh, yeah duh. Nobody would.
There’s a lot of well-earned distrust in AI as a whole. The end result is people don’t trust AI companies or their endeavors. This distrust was curated and built by people like Altman and Dario. It didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you want people to support your projects, you have to at least PRETEND you’re on their side. Telling them straight-up “I intend to ruin your life” isn’t a winning strategy. And, everyone, let’s stop pretending like this is our first day on Earth.
Exactly. What, other than buy yacht and cocaine and hooker, are you going to do with all that money, Sam Altman? Pretend we already gave you all the money. What job can my nephews go to school for so that they will have a career 10 years from now? What research institutes are you going to create to hire people to do the remaining jobs, Sam Altman? I didn't vote for you to be the guy that gets to decide but we live under American Crapitalism so that's the direction we're going.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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?
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.
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.
> "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
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.
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 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.
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. 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.
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.
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).
Humans do not need alfalfa to survive. None of these desert farms grow food that humans eat. Most of it gets exported so americans dont even eat the animals that eat it
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.
>"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The farm grows animal feed that is exported. Why should we support that? It provides 0 value for americans outside the farmer doing the exporting and uses a shitload of the water that we desperately need to fill the lake. Im a UT district 1 voter and at this point Ill vote for anyone that bans farming here in UT. Completely unsustainable
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.
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.
Haha cool. I am firmly against this data-center then. /s
The joke there is that states can't agree to a thing about that watershed and also don't seem to look beyond it when they are making rules. That apparently includes my own tunnel vision.
As a resident of the Colorado River watershed, our inability to negotiate a sustainable plan for the water is one strong reason I support a moratorium on any new water intensive infrastructure (which does not include all data center designs).
> "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"
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.
It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.
Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.
I don't trust the datacenter side of the table at all. I don't trust their claims. I don't trust their numbers. We have myriad examples of their lies. Do we have any examples of them being good corporate citizens that offset this?
I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.
There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?
It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.
If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception
I think it's a proxy for something else. Data centers are associated with AI and the AI billionaires were seen with Trump and Musk has his own baggage. Data centers are apparently being built but unless you go look them up online, I doubt most people know where they are even (and I don't know if those maps are accurate). What will happen is the AI billionaires and tech will politically realign and then it suddenly won't be an issue anymore.
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.
Unfortunately people have no difficulties having completely contradictory and absurd views. Understanding of the concept of a supply chain or dependency web is also quite weak.
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.
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...
Yea, a lot of the opposition is around these deals being cut at 3:00 in the morning in secret meetings in a shady, smoke-filled room, deliberately avoiding public input and scrutiny. Even if it's not grift and corruption, it certainly looks like grift and corruption.
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 these moneys 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 would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing. Right now their sales pitch is basically we know it might suck having a data center in your backyard and it's a major bummer that any product involving a computer chip is vastly more expensive for the first time ever, but on the other hand our new AI technology is going to take your job and maybe destroy humanity.
I'm sure these guys aren't dumb, but they certainly act pretty dumb. What really solidified it for me was the choice they made to build data centers literally right next to neighborhoods and then run incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7. Even if they were legally allowed to do that, how they did they imagine it would go explicitly signalling that they couldn't give two shits about people living in the community? It's definitely some combination of incompetence and hubris to not predict the resulting backlash.
> I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing.
It won't. These people are fully convinced that literally everyone but them are all just clueless morons pushing back against their godlike infallible genius because we're all jealous of their wealth and power.
> 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”
Actually the datacenter boom is already making it so only the rich have access, and the rest of us can maybe rent a little. Prices out a new box lately?
The supply of computer components in the next few years is in fact fixed and cannot be changed.
After that, when more Litography machines have been built and facilities constructed, that may change. But even then I don't see how this will reduce component prices below the pre-AI-boom numbers? Chip production was already very efficient and already had very good economies of scale. Any attempt to ramp up production quickly will just lead to higher costs in facility construction, that need to be recouped. (Unless AI is a bubble that bursts, at which point components will be cheap, but only for a moment)
You’re making the case against infrastructure spending to meet demand needs in general. Your argument applies to oil prices, housing prices, inflation in general and I think that’s silly. CapEx Eventually does get subsumed into profit and debt.
Other than war, price pressure is the only lever we have for abundance and a pivot against a future of rationing and constant whinging and committee hearings about which technology is allowed to use how much RAM.
The US is in a very fortunate position at the top of the global AI food chain. We don't build the chips, we don't build the machines that build the chips, we don't mine the rare earths that make up the chips.
But the chips land on our soil and are programmed by our companies (often by immigrants).
I think if we forfeit our spot it could be pretty bad economically.
Yes this is exactly what NIMBYs who want to prevent new housing from existing say. And preventing people in a community from having a day in what gets built in their neighborhoods is precislely what state level YIMBY laws in California are intended to do.
If you cannot see the fundamental difference between building datacenters that suck power, provide no local jobs, are a nuisance, and can be located almost anywhere and housing for people I simply don’t know what to tell you.
Your point is that the arguments are topologically similar but you are ignoring the impacts.
The impacts of data centers on people living nearby are basically nothing, and pretty much all anti-data-center-sentiment is driven by misinformed or willfully-delusional people. Even the idea that it's a problem that data centers "provide no local jobs" is crazy - there are all sorts of built structures that provide no local jobs because they simply have nothing to do with a business that hires employees, the idea that a data center doing much the same thing justifies making it illegal to build is crazy.
I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.
If data centres were forced to contribute what was required to build the utility infrastructure required to support them, that might be true. For example, electricity costs.
Datacentres are generally built where poor people live. If you are on minimum wage and suddenly someone increases your electricity bill by $300 because of data centres, on top of all the other increases tied to things like energy insecurity... I can understand why people would consider that an impact.
Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
>Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
I can legally operate a slaughterhouse. How about I buy the plots on both sides of your house and start killing, gutting and cleaning cows, pigs, sheep and other animals?
Any waste can be removed a couple times a week.
I'd expect that you'd object to that perfectly reasonable business plan, yes?
What's that? There are laws (usually zoning) about who (If anyone) can run a slaughterhouse on your street?
Whatever do you mean?
Who are you to tell me what I can do on my private property?
I don't mind that. Run a slaughterhouse around my house if you want. I live in a low regulation place regarding mixing residential/business and in fact there is already a slaughterhouse next to me.
Because private property is not an axiom of reality laid down by god, it's a legal and social custom of man.
A monopoly over a piece of land can never be absolute because it exists in the context of the socioeconomic network around it, everything the landowner does necessarily affects the quality and value of the properties around them. The rights of the landowner cannot be considered in isolation from the rights of everyone affected by the landowner's actions. The political legitimacy of property rights is contingent on enough of society believing that they are worth enforcing, so it's not just ethical but strategically sensible for landowners to not be antisocial with their land.
If I decided to buy the property next to yours and use it for large-scale hobbyist production of my favourite fermented fish sauce, as is my right as the landowner, I'm sure you'd come around to my way of thinking in fairly short order.
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.
The issue is not the intent of the rules, but the actual effect, which is 1) increasing the time and cost involved in building anything, and 2) abuse of those rules by bad-faith actors who wish to block or delay a development that would on average benefit the local community.
> that would on average benefit the local community.
The AI boosters appear to have badly failed in convincing local communities of this.
Perhaps they should have started off with an informative AI positive PR campaign rather than ... whatever it was that put local communities off the notion.
What is the benefit of a data center to the local community? This is the real problem. Best case, it’s eh, whatever. It doesn’t provide jobs, but if planned and built properly it is largely inoffensive (provided that it does not cause electricity rates to rise; this is pretty locally specific as different electricity markets work different ways). Worst case, you have Elon Musk putting old jet engines next to your house, or that Bitcoin miner in Texas where neighbours report 90db noise.
At the very least, laws need to prevent the second case.
I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
> 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.
This is like saying "tech employees don't raise rents, landlords raise rents in response to tech employees offering their fat salaries" - it's a distinction without a difference and the end result is what people object to.
OK, let's take that example. It is true -- landlords are responsible for raising rents, and they do so in response to demand for housing. In some places, landlords are not allowed to arbitrarily raise rents -- for example, by limiting rent increases to follow the CPI. In theory you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
This reminds me of the short-form video (Daily Show?) I saw recently of a man in a red hat insisting that the government should facilitate union workers increasingly gaining ownership of the companies and corporations they work for.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
Right, but the point is not that it is possible, it is that there are other, more important issues here. Let's say we regulate the utilities so that residential customers will not be impacted by industrial users (or by DC operators specifically). The result would be higher utility bills for those industrial users, which would encourage the use of things like turbine generators -- which I would say is a negative outcome we should avoid.
It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.
Rents rise in proportion to the rest of the market, you look at comparables. The market is a function of supply and demand. When my city passed a bunch of tenant laws ~16k units left the market and rents went up proportionally.
> utility companies raise rates in response to demand,
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
>>“- 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”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
Regulated monopolies can be more efficient than state ownership... if the regulatory framework has the correct incentives. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do.
The benefit with regulated monopolies are that you have a separation of control between regulation (from PSC/voters) and monopoly (running its business).
If the current regulatory regime isn't producing the desired results, it can be changed.
With straight state ownership, things are much more entangled.
Florida passed a state law that has standards are somewhat close to what you wrote, yet communities down here still voted to ban datacenter construction.
This is why free markets need reasonable legislation.
Even if a good willing CEO wants to do what's right, he is pressured not to do it by the unlegislated free market - his company is at (economical) disadvantage with the opposition, putting the company at risk or not meeting his obligations to shareholders. Let's not blame consumers either, because they cannot be informed about consequences in the nth order either.
If the legislation is reasonable, everyone must play by the same rules, both the good and the bad willing CEOs. The companies gain trust, the government too, and the consumers (and affected citizens) win.
These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.
Yes, I'm a NIMBY. Someone want to build more houses, maybe that's good, but the roads need to be scaled up to match. Want to build a datacenter, ok but what's in it for me? The people long-term invested in a town are the ones who should be making decisions on how to develop it, not someone coming in from the outside to make a buck.
There's a balance too. The way to increase my home value is not to say no to absolutely everything.
I worked for a lab that was building a new computer room and it spent about a year in the permitting process with the local town council before getting approved. Most of the focus in that process was on the geothermal cooling system.
Why must this be done at the federal(I presume what you mean when you say national) level? Seems to me, this should be up to the local community, if they want a datacenter or not.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
> 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 the immediately preceding sentence pretty clearly laid out their rational. (Not saying I agree or disagree, just that I think your question was already answered).
People are clamoring to control what others can do on their own personal property, and then people would complain they are banned from fixing their car in their backyard. Why do people want to make their own lives worse? Do they think these laws only apply to some "other" group?
Because the tech companies operate at the national level and individual communities are at a massive disadvantage if they just negotiated individually.
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
It was recently announced that Meta was building a DC about 75km from my city that is going to be using ~1.8GW of power.
What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.
That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.
That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.
> 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:
That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.
The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"
The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this. What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
> The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this.
Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.
> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.
Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.
The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?
> The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs
I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly
I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"
Not sure what you suggest to do. Plenty of countries will love to have datacenters. And these datacenters do compute, they don't need fast data transfer, they can be anywhere, pings don't matter. Plenty of countries actually love AI.
I'd argue, the biggest problem with AI is that it makes totalitarianism a lot more attractive, because it is an infinitely big state that controls all resources: so if AI becomes everything and deprives people of agency, it's no problem: government marshals all resources anyway and people have no agency even without AI if country is totalitarian - but it can also make quick decisions with no political bullshit.
I would like the Overton window to be where you are. Till it gets there, when people are still accusing opposition of being clueless, this is a good counterpoint and resting place for agreement.
Like I said, if you watch the video I linked it's him going over his ideas for regulating the AI industry in general. I only typed up the parts regarding datacenters because it was what's most relevant to the article and the discussion.
Corporate power is now so great that they successfully lobby to reduce/eliminate their tax burden so they don't pay for infrastructure they need.
Workers pay that cost through increased market prices and taxes (eg energy) which also drives up other prices. It's not inflationary because it's a real value adjustment but everyone can pretend it is while real term wages drop even further.
This all seems reasonable. My question is, how would data centre bossess genuinely respond to these points?
I find it difficult get to the genuine points, as the whole topic is piled high with “arguments”, PR, marketing, and other junk discourse being emitted from all sides.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadDrake Yes: Green compute sanctuaries
Bet me this isn’t just going to be a PR issue.
One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.
Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.
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.
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.
Tax breaks are usually at the state level, towns get paid out, which is why so many towns were rubber stamping approvals so quickly.
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.
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?
I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.
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.
Anything other than that is socialism for corporations.
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.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
That's because before the AI race began (1) no one was trying to build more data centers in a couple years than had previously been built in the entire history of civilization, and (2) the new data centers are an order of magnitude bigger than pre-AI race data centers.
This is not going to affect small businesses.
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.
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.
What is Big Tech doing that you think everyone else should have a say in?
Big Tech didn't reshape the Internet...its customers did, by flocking to their products by the billions.
Big Tech isn't reshaping the workforce...employers are, by once again flocking to their products.
Weird place to come in and dissuade discussions between differing view points. This is at the root of our difficulty in finding compromise and ending the hyperbolic extremes on the left and right.
> I disagree violently with Acemoglu on free speech
In what sense? What is your perspective on his perspective and why it is wrong?
My gaps with Acemoglu et al re: "Building Pro-Worker Ai" is that there is handwaving at how we incentivize augmentation over full automation, and how new jobs and tasks are created.
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”
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.
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.
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...
This is the doublespeak that has the public so distrustful: value companies at billions and trillions of dollars based primarily on their ability to replace your workforce, then tell the workforce there will be no displacement. It's insults the intelligence of reasonable people.
Example; my son’s teacher uses AI to make new reading material (mostly graphics), he’s pretty good at keeping quality up and making things relevant to the kids’ real life. But critically without AI, he would not have otherwise hired an illustrator, this is wholesale new economic activity. Not a replacement.
Outside of marketing hype, this is what is mostly happening across the economy. No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
I don't really know what this means. If you need a concrete example, just look at Figma's product roadmap. Look at Fiverr. Your son's teacher is, generally, replacing demand for an educational product with direct production. There was a whole supply chain being replaced with an inference vendor. If you're saying that kind of production doesn't also use generative art, I think you're being very selective.
Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement. The explanation of job market contraction is also replacement. The electorate are responding in their own interests to what they are being told.
That’s a headline read of the situation on the ground is what I’m saying. The frontline is a lot more complex than just a 1-to-1 replacement.
My sons teacher still regularly uses library books (that regularly buys published books), now he can just add a story about his cats visiting the firehouse, cats the kids have met, hyper personalized and made more relevant, a market created totally new and replacing nothing in place.
Figma is on a hiring spree, just FYI, to drive my point home. This is pure pie growth.
Short-termism is always a thing I guess, but these companies just end up hiring different (who can use the AI better) people down the line, which is in line with my conclusion.
> it's doing none of this
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..
Are you saying AI is not innovation or that the public needs a permanent veto on what is and isn't viable innovation?
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.
And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but on basic inspection, you should absolutely expect the exact opposite. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor and entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive wages 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...
'We are regularly deceptive and unadulteratedly self interested. Now we're going to create a catastrophic problem for you, one that is reasonably likely to be unprecedented in scale, because we deem it to be profitable for us. But don't worry, we promise to throw you a bone in the future to make it a bit more tolerable. Deal?'
I mean this framing is 100% media/algorithmic feed driven. A forest fire burning down your house is a catastrophe, can we get some perspective?
This just feels like slopulism at this point.
This outcome is exactly what's driving the multi-trillion dollar valuations. The idea is that companies will be able to eliminate much of their labor and replace it with LLMs, LLM companies will rug-pull and investors get rich(er). A nice way of phrasing this is 'increasing the productivity' of companies' remaining labor forces, but it's the same outcome regardless of framing.
My optimism comes from what happens after this, but there's a high probability of rough waters on the horizon for a very large chunk of the labor force, before we enter into a new equilibrium. Trying to imagine things are just going to stay roughly the same is, in my opinion, just not a realistic view at all, almost regardless of the assumptions you make.
And given how non-independent society is now a days, shaking things up like this will likely have an unprecedented impact, even if the shaking was probably more severe from previous revolutionary leaps.
With this historic perspective we know we’ve gotten through this before and we can do better this time. More generous unemployment benefits, better retraining methods, these are all on the table.
What we shouldn’t do is give in to panic populism. We live in a representative democracy not a direct one precisely so representatives can balance the needs for growth, innovation and real across the board wealth creation over a more popular stagnant jobs program.
Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well.
Assuming you're human, this makes me think that you don't actually have any logic for your position and are instead ad hoc formulating an argument after picking a desired conclusion, rather than logically working your way to a conclusion.
I don't think most people see it this way, and if we can expand government help (esp at the municipal and state levels), then the thing people are panicking about need not come true.
Quoting myself again
“Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well. The real catastrophe would have been banning electricity distribution grids even though that’s what the rioting (see: “panicking”) lamplighters demanded”
(The coal miners would become coal extraction machine operators...which is roughly what happened as well)
Countless lives were completely destroyed in spite of 'government retraining' promises. Those who carried on managed to do through some menial labor and other jobs, many with even worse conditions and for worse pay. For instance trucking was a fairly common new profession - where you're away from family pretty much all the time, and getting paid even less. It's a horrible job, but it's the sort of work that was left for them.
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.
For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.
Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.
Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.
A household can’t compete with a data center on electricity/ water prices. So households will have to pay more.
"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.
Silicon Valley and it's kool-aid chugging autists have fucked America in the ass one time too many, methinks.
ps. Have never used tiktok
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
The posturing from AI executives has been this will destroy labor. Whether or not that actually happens doesn’t matter - that’s their stance, their dream. They say it basically every chance they get.
Why, then, would average people want to help the people who very plainly state they are against them? It makes no sense.
Everyone here is shocked that average people aren’t willingly to obviously advocate against themselves. Uh, yeah duh. Nobody would.
There’s a lot of well-earned distrust in AI as a whole. The end result is people don’t trust AI companies or their endeavors. This distrust was curated and built by people like Altman and Dario. It didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you want people to support your projects, you have to at least PRETEND you’re on their side. Telling them straight-up “I intend to ruin your life” isn’t a winning strategy. And, everyone, let’s stop pretending like this is our first day on Earth.
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.
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.
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 much?
i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm
You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Discovery of Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductors: https://www.vals.ai/blogs/room-temperature-magnetic-semicond...
Diagnoses of things multiple accomplished doctors could not do: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kaw3cv/chatgpt_di...
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.
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 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.
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
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.
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.
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
The joke there is that states can't agree to a thing about that watershed and also don't seem to look beyond it when they are making rules. That apparently includes my own tunnel vision.
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"
Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.
I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.
There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?
It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.
If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck
I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception
How? Is it a tourist attraction?
I mean, we're talking about something that is pretty close to being a lights-out facility with employment for maybe 12 people.
Private compounds owned by billionaires who believe data centers are the best. Seems to me, they already have a solution to their problem.
Data Centers on the Ballot
https://datacentersontheballot.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50361608)
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.
- 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.
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 these moneys 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.
I'm sure these guys aren't dumb, but they certainly act pretty dumb. What really solidified it for me was the choice they made to build data centers literally right next to neighborhoods and then run incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7. Even if they were legally allowed to do that, how they did they imagine it would go explicitly signalling that they couldn't give two shits about people living in the community? It's definitely some combination of incompetence and hubris to not predict the resulting backlash.
It won't. These people are fully convinced that literally everyone but them are all just clueless morons pushing back against their godlike infallible genius because we're all jealous of their wealth and power.
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
That’s my point.
... you sure about that one chief?
After that, when more Litography machines have been built and facilities constructed, that may change. But even then I don't see how this will reduce component prices below the pre-AI-boom numbers? Chip production was already very efficient and already had very good economies of scale. Any attempt to ramp up production quickly will just lead to higher costs in facility construction, that need to be recouped. (Unless AI is a bubble that bursts, at which point components will be cheap, but only for a moment)
Other than war, price pressure is the only lever we have for abundance and a pivot against a future of rationing and constant whinging and committee hearings about which technology is allowed to use how much RAM.
Pressure on.
But the chips land on our soil and are programmed by our companies (often by immigrants).
I think if we forfeit our spot it could be pretty bad economically.
We hate NIMBYs when others get what they want.
That’s life I guess.
Your point is that the arguments are topologically similar but you are ignoring the impacts.
I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/27/electrici...
Datacentres are generally built where poor people live. If you are on minimum wage and suddenly someone increases your electricity bill by $300 because of data centres, on top of all the other increases tied to things like energy insecurity... I can understand why people would consider that an impact.
I can legally operate a slaughterhouse. How about I buy the plots on both sides of your house and start killing, gutting and cleaning cows, pigs, sheep and other animals?
Any waste can be removed a couple times a week.
I'd expect that you'd object to that perfectly reasonable business plan, yes?
What's that? There are laws (usually zoning) about who (If anyone) can run a slaughterhouse on your street?
Whatever do you mean?
Who are you to tell me what I can do on my private property?
Are you some kind of communist?
I think in a residential area that would be more profitable than a slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouses don't really pencil out in busy neighborhoods.
A monopoly over a piece of land can never be absolute because it exists in the context of the socioeconomic network around it, everything the landowner does necessarily affects the quality and value of the properties around them. The rights of the landowner cannot be considered in isolation from the rights of everyone affected by the landowner's actions. The political legitimacy of property rights is contingent on enough of society believing that they are worth enforcing, so it's not just ethical but strategically sensible for landowners to not be antisocial with their land.
If I decided to buy the property next to yours and use it for large-scale hobbyist production of my favourite fermented fish sauce, as is my right as the landowner, I'm sure you'd come around to my way of thinking in fairly short order.
Er... I mean, if that's the case, then, fine, I guess?
I do not believe that this is actually the case. People build heavily regulated industrial facilities all the time.
The AI boosters appear to have badly failed in convincing local communities of this.
Perhaps they should have started off with an informative AI positive PR campaign rather than ... whatever it was that put local communities off the notion.
At the very least, laws need to prevent the second case.
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.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
Yes, that's what the politicians in question are proposing.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
- 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”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
This seems imminently fair to me.
Note that the utility monopolies are posting record profits that have increased steadily over the last decade.
This was always a silly idea. You either have health competition or state ownership. Monopolies is literally the worst of both worlds.
The benefit with regulated monopolies are that you have a separation of control between regulation (from PSC/voters) and monopoly (running its business).
If the current regulatory regime isn't producing the desired results, it can be changed.
With straight state ownership, things are much more entangled.
Indeed, forcing those datacenter employees to carry their pee home with them will make them think twice about replacing us with AI
Even if a good willing CEO wants to do what's right, he is pressured not to do it by the unlegislated free market - his company is at (economical) disadvantage with the opposition, putting the company at risk or not meeting his obligations to shareholders. Let's not blame consumers either, because they cannot be informed about consequences in the nth order either.
If the legislation is reasonable, everyone must play by the same rules, both the good and the bad willing CEOs. The companies gain trust, the government too, and the consumers (and affected citizens) win.
Because after decades of lies, one tends to just assume that pathological liars are gonna lie pretty much all the time?
There's a balance too. The way to increase my home value is not to say no to absolutely everything.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
I think the immediately preceding sentence pretty clearly laid out their rational. (Not saying I agree or disagree, just that I think your question was already answered).
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
We're still on the ride, and it's not gonna slow down to let any of us off.
What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.
That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.
That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.
That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.
The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"
Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.
> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.
Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.
The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?
I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly
I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"
I'd argue, the biggest problem with AI is that it makes totalitarianism a lot more attractive, because it is an infinitely big state that controls all resources: so if AI becomes everything and deprives people of agency, it's no problem: government marshals all resources anyway and people have no agency even without AI if country is totalitarian - but it can also make quick decisions with no political bullshit.
I would like the Overton window to be where you are. Till it gets there, when people are still accusing opposition of being clueless, this is a good counterpoint and resting place for agreement.
Workers pay that cost through increased market prices and taxes (eg energy) which also drives up other prices. It's not inflationary because it's a real value adjustment but everyone can pretend it is while real term wages drop even further.
It's not exactly brain surgery.
I find it difficult get to the genuine points, as the whole topic is piled high with “arguments”, PR, marketing, and other junk discourse being emitted from all sides.
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?