It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised that people here are calling the opposition to datacenters reflexive NIMBYism. They draw tons of power which causes everybody's utility bills to go up because of the need to add additional electrical capacity, they create very few jobs besides during the initial construction phase, and once the AI boom ends they'll become huge abandoned structures that the very small local police force will then be responsible for guarding. It's a huge net negative for any community they're built in.
Some have been built where there wasn't enough power currently available from the grid but would later be available, and were allowed to operate using temporary power sources until then which can cause serious pollution issues for nearby communities.
A notorious example was/is xAI's Memphis data center. They started out using a loophole that let them power it with dozens of gas turbines without permits that didn't have to meet air pollution standards. (I don't remember for sure, but I think they were using them under a rule that is meant for emergencies like natural disasters).
The surrounding communities, mostly poor and minority with not much political clout, already had air that was significantly worse than wealthier and whiter parts of the area, and the data center pushed that to levels health officials considered to be alarming, like a 79% rise in peak NO2 nearby.
This was actually bad enough that even the Trump administration had to act and the EPA now had a rule making it harder for data centers to exploit that loophole.
But they are still using gas turbines, 15 instead of dozens, and they now are permitted and have more pollution controls, but independent data suggests it remains a major source of the smog in the surrounding neighborhoods. They are expected to be fully on the grid later this year.
Very little daily benefit? I think they have to agree that the magic of applications like Waze or Google Docs or OpenAI don't magically happen without some data center somewhere. It's like people complaining about the smell of hog farms but insisting on eating pork.
Maybe it's better to just say that they're shouldering more of the burden?
>> It’s not just rural Americans that are against data centers. It’s most working class Americans who understand that data centers increase their everyday expenses significantly, but provide very little daily benefit.
> Very little daily benefit? I think they have to agree that the magic of applications like Waze or Google Docs or OpenAI don't magically happen without some data center somewhere. It's like people complaining about the smell of hog farms but insisting on eating pork.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Pay attention to the context.
It seems like since the AI boom, people have been building more datacenters, that are bigger, and using more power. I mean FFS, memory prices are through the roof and NVIDIA is pulling back from the consumer market. This isn't about building data-centers for "Waze or Google Docs," or any of those applications people actually benefit from.
