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- Hacker News
- The political thing to do here is run for office on a "Data Centers are teh Devil" platform; harness the angst; win; and then do the opposite and approve them all.
Teach the peasantry the value of their benighted opinions.
by smitty1e - Data center pushback is inevitable when entire neighborhoods feel the heat and noise.by kwhitlock
- That is totally going to work, doubling down on something unpopular by un unpopular government has never caused exponentially bigger blowback.by m4rtink
- They're counting on blowback not mattering.by duskdozer
- Hamstringing the build out of AI compute facilities in the United States is strategic suicide.
AI compute is a major emerging export industry and the United States is very well positioned to dominate it, unlike mass manufacturing. If it cannot take advantage of its unique strength in AI compute, then it is going to lose the global economic race.
AI compute is the first major expansion of physical capital in the United States since the post-war era. Decades of outsourcing and downsizing are finally reversing and helping spur a constellation of supporting industries, like gas turbine manufacturing, a scaling up of energy production and upgrades in the telecommunication infrastructure, in building out high-capacity data links.
by ETH_start - Original
E.P.A. Moves to Curb Public Input on Data Centers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/climate/epa-data-centers-...
- Many data centers will move north into the Nordic countries where the climate is colder and there is a lot of hydroelectric and wind power. Canada and the Nordic countries will end up building a lot of data centers in remote areas where they are less visible.
At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.
by NishanStepak - The question is who will service massive data centers in northern Québec or Norwegian mountains in winter.
They will have to be robotized to a large degree. And the few humans necessary will have to be very well paid. The social cost is real.
by inglor_cz - How naive I was to hope that the strain data centers will place on the electric grid would spur very big, very public investment in renewable energy and nuclear.
Somebody has to realize that gas turbines are backordered to the 2030s meanwhile the ROI on solar is getting impossible to ignore.
by randusername - They'll just buy you out, no more power or water for you, peasantby boesboes
- Hopefully that 'somebody' that realizes is this US Administration, which to date has paid billions in fees to wind energy companies to not build wind farms. They are quite literally paying companies to not build renewable energy.
- It might "spur" through higher prices, since electricity is basically a private concern is (most? All?) of the US and many Western countries. Of course the general public hates this inflation and hence the cause.
The only fair and workable solution is to make the data center investors pay for the grid upgrade before the data center is turned on. They can wait a decade for nuclear reactors, right?
by pjc50 - It’s funny as Greg Abbott says the data center industry did this to themselves and people’s complaints are justified; the feds say it’s “paid protestors”, the same way they say any protests are inorganic paid leftist agitators. Meanwhile “real” American patriots know data centers make America great, and can’t wait to have one built down the road.by ModernMech
- Feds can say anything, but majority of people wouldn't hate AI if they weren't losing their jobs.by cute_boi
- Data Centers is the only time in my memory that Greg Abbott has even thought about listening to citizen concerns.
And of course, when the citizens selling THC beverages were concerned about the legislature making the product illegal.
Me thinks the Data Center people have been stingy with the checkbook.
by budman1 - What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere.
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
by oefrha - Datacenters need a source of water, and human populations are usually concentrated in those places too for the same reason.by uniq7
- There is a bunch of relativly big cities even in the arctic circle.
Murmansk (population 295,374) Russia; Norilsk (178,018) in Russia; Tromsø (75,638) in Norway; Vorkuta (58,133) in Russia; Bodø (52,357) Norway; Harstad (24,703) in Norway; Kiruna, Sweden (22,841)
by fikama - It's difficult getting a grid connection and fiber optic uplinks in the middle of nowhere.by armada651
- They can, surely, but I presume that in some cases there's a lack of preexisting regulation on land use and on others politicians are not properly representing the interests of their constituency.by jhanschoo
- It seems that e.g. OpenAI is mostly power constrained. To go to the middle of nowhere would mean also basically no power grid to speak off?by Phemist
- Because they need the local infrastructure to support them, which would be difficult and expensive to reproduce out in the middle of nowhere.by plasticchris
- It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know that go out of their way to use AI, mostly seem interested in building their own AI rigs and running everything locally. I know that's what I do; I almost never use any hosted AI services these days, but I'm using more tokens than ever. The demand for data centers from people who actually like AI even seems to be plummeting.by Zambyte
- How is anti pollution argument pro ai?
And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models. Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.
by nonethewiser - You don’t get to 25 or 30 trillion total addressable market by providing AI for the people who like AI. The whole plan is to replace all white collar work with AI. This requires more data centers. The people who benefit the most from this will see the least of the negative effects.by GPerson
- What are you running at home, out of interest?
While I cautiously circle the AI programming concept, one thing close to my mind has definitely been whether the ultimately cloud-tied nature of it is what makes me much more stand offish to it.
by XorNot - We're already at the point where a few months worth of an SMB's token usage from the SaaS LLM providers costs is equivalent to the cost of installing on-prem infrastructure capable of running cutting-edge open-weight models at scale. At my company, we recently installed a server with an array of Gaudi 2 cards on our server rack, and have set up an Open WebUI frontend to expose an LLM connected to all of our internal resources to our staff. The total cost was about $20k, which we'd easily eat up with six months worth of equivalent Claude usage.
We'd originally set this up to be able to locally run larger models, in the 300-400 billion parameter range, but the rate of improvement of open-weight models has been so fast that, coupled with extensive custom skill creation, we're now getting similar results out of Qwen3.8 27B to what we were getting out of Qwen 3.5 297B when we started out with the project, which frees enough memory to allow 20-25 users to have 256K context concurrently. Both the hardware, the software, and the models are improving at an accelerating rate.
Investing in data centers to support SaaS LLM providers today feels a bit like investing in mainframes and minicomputers in the late '70s, with a massive paradigm shift lurking right around the corner.
Actually, it's probably already closer to the early '80s, given that purpose-built local AI workstations are already available at price points lower than the inflation-adjusted initial price of the original IBM PC.
by Gormo - There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.
In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
by cmiles8 - No? This isn't a planning permission question, the federal government has eminent domain and can simply take land for federal use. Just like with the railroads and power grid.
Of course building datacenters is absolutely not what eminent domain is for, but rules don't apply anymore, so they'll probably do it anyway until the supreme court stops them.
by unrented7977 - They can certainly look the other way when these small town boards get paid off to allow the datacenter.