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  • Hacker News
  • Anyone who has never lived next to a data center is commentating on the side lines without experience about what it’s actually like.

    Lots of these commentaries miss the following: - noise and uncomfortable vibrations making nearby habitual living challenging - rises costs of power and water - more traffic and disruption to traveling patterns

    The first is a big deal. These companies have a history of refusing to address noise and disruptions to neighbors personal health. They simply don’t care because they only care about the money. Its greed at an immense level. Until you’re ready to accept you would be comfortable with a data center as your neighbor you have 0 skin in making decisions for others who do.

    And the rich bourgeoisie people who are so misguided about this: mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary famous shark tank billionaires, who claim “you’re experiencing Chinese propaganda about data centers” and probably even anyone on these forums who makes a strong claim without experience, would never ever accept living next to a data center. They are sideline commentators and should take responsibility for the harms to local people.

    by mannanj
  • People don't want the billionaires coming into your town and having their way with it, the one you live in and are supposed to get a say in how things are done. This is not difficult to understand.
    by nancyminusone
  • I'm glad to see that people unite for things like this. This is important and necessary.
    by jeanmichelselli
  • It's just sad that Americans only unite when it's something in their own backyard. Democracy in the US is collapsing, and people are standing idly by. Maybe they'll leave an angry comment under a TikTok video, but that's about all the patriotism people seem to muster.
    by spiderfarmer
  • Turns out putting them in space is the answer!
    by greenowl
  • I am quite sure you are being facetious, but XRot has made me doubt everything.
    by muddi900
  • > Turns out putting them in space is the answer!

    Can we put them on Mars, and maybe send Elon to tend them?

    by blooalien
  • Why don't they just buy extra land surrounding the data center to reduce noise pollution concerns?

    Regardless hopefully this restarts nuclear power generation

    by vatsachak
  • Everyone against data centers is doing cost-benefit analysis. If the data center folks want to solve this, work on that ratio. And both sides, if you please, since the perceived benefit right now is basically zero.
    by beej71
  • Archive link: http://archive.today/0Rxl7
    by tolugenius
  • The intense anti-DC sentiment shouldn't be surprising - NIMBYism is the only viable mechanism available to people in the US. It doesn't matter if you're worried about Glonzo or have real concerns, they must be expressed in NIMBY terms in order to be heard.

    For example, imagine you're worried about what goes on inside those DCs, are worried about the lack of accountability from Big Tech and would like to see sensible consumer-protection regulations. Can you express that anywhere? Sure, you can leave random comments somewhere, but that doesn't matter. OTOH, you can actually join a local NIMBY group and slow things down. It's not what you want, but it's better than nothing. Same goes for people worried about clean energy and other issues.

    by martythemaniak
  • This is fair and I think it’s what is really happening here.

    The only lever the government seems to have is tax breaks, and the only lever the people seem to have is NIMBYism. What a joke.

    by iamnothere
  • I think this is why I'm sort of excited about this, even if some of it's "misguided" according to some.

    I haven't seen people really care and mobilize since maybe BLM?

    by nixosbestos
  • Residents of the state should get money for needing to live next to data centers and the use of their land/natural resources/etc, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund.
    by neko_ranger
  • You can just do this for everything everywhere with near-zero enforcement complexity by instituting a high Land Value Tax
    by estearum
  • They already do, indirectly. The local government gets property taxes from these data centers. But maybe it would be more real for people if you just wrote them a check I guess.
    by jrflo
  • Many things divide us here: Wawa or Sheetz; cheesesteaks or pierogi; Eagles or Steelers; but I very glad we could come together on this.
    by doublepg23
  • Really the main issue causing the data center backlash is because they aren't building new 100% green energy production capacity with it. When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike. Additionally, without that green energy capacity they will cause much more air pollution.
    by kerhackernews
  • So not the massive Chinese bot farm (200K +) launching anti-datacenter propaganda campaigns? It's just the green energy concern? ("Spiking local prices" was one of the propaganda talking points.)

    These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.

    There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.

    by slowmovintarget
  • Companies are content to charge more in the short term to pay for the upgrades on the backs of the current subscribers as opposed to just charging the people for whom the extra load is desired.

    Then these big buyers go ahead and pay 50% of what everyone else is paying.

    by altcognito
  • And if they can't give capacity, they should maybe be required to give a kind of "call option" or hedge locals energy prices linked to regular inflation.
    by sarjann
  • > When you drop a data center into an area, energy prices will spike

    Why is that?

    Where I live my energy bill is a fixed cost. It's a super expensive fixed cost, since I'm living in Germany, but it is fixed none the less. It increases year by year because all costs only go up, but it remains completely unaffected by unrelated infrastructure being built around where I live.

    I've been to a data center before due to work and my impression of the place was really good. It's kinda invisible from the outside, everything is extremely clean. There's no noise on the outside and the excess heat is used to get people cheap warm water or something like that.

    I'm quite confused why people suddenly hate on them. Feels like I'm missing a whole lot of context.

    by OroPla
  • Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal. People are sick of tech companies bribing their way out of any accountability.
    by lisp2240
  • Exactly

    Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.

    I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.

    by sschueller
  • Also Sam, Dario et al have constantly (like literally, every single week at least) been telling us that AI is going to make all of us unemployable and have to live on welfare.

    Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?

    The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology

    by ifwinterco
  • I suspect the authors of this paper would like to hear out your evidence for increasing energy prices https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777

    In the United States at least there's been plenty of polling on why people oppose data centers. Consistently, it's water usage and water contamination fears, which is exactly what you see most often in social media and discussed online. I think a lot of high-minded rationalizations are just trying to dodge the embarrassing fact that people simply think data centers are draining municipal and natural water sources.

    by lordgilman
  • I can actually speak to this as someone in ruralish Pennsylvania whose town is going through one of these backlashes pretty heavily.

    The major issue, at least in my neighborhood, is location more than anything else. We have a lot of industrially zoned areas that are great for data center location, and where they could be surrounded by other established industrial builds (think soda bottling plants, warehouses, transportation depos, semiconductor fabs, etc.) All the infrastructure is built out, electricity needs, etc. There is also a ton of land that exists that could be used for this purpose pretty distantly from town centers, if you can convince the gov/owners to part with it.

    But despite this, the folks who want to expand data centers are instead trying to push instead into residential areas, or otherwise on land that would basically butt you up against pre-existing neighborhoods. Where I lack insight is if it's a matter of industrial property being too expensive compared to the swathes of otherwise unused land (at least that isn't used for state forests or whatnot,) or if there just literally is no room available for what they want to build out. But all the aspects of having bought your land to be in a residential area suddenly become way busy, value might go down because it's now in this weird quasi-industrial zone.

    While there are legitimate concerns about the electricity/water usage, I (tinfoil hat) think that this is more of a game of influence/propaganda/state-level interest in an subject where it's easy to sow seeds of dissent. I personally think the electricity/water thing is a concern on a bigger scale than just individual utility bills, but it's blown out of proportion under that guise by conveniently cherry picking data from extreme examples. I also (more tinfoil) think that there's a lot of money changing hands since the AI boom is still growing and people are desperate to try to make a buck asap in any way possible, regardless of what may come tomorrow, so they're more willing to make a profit off of everything, but I have no legitimate proof of this.

    by JimiofEden