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Comment by chromacity | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly surprised why local governments are so eager to make datacenter deals in the first place. I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region. So if the voters don't want it, that feels like their prerogative.

I don't know if it's the elected officials conflating data centers with the region becoming a bustling tech hub, rather than just a way for a Bay Area company to capitalize on cheap electricity... or if it's kickbacks.

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> it doesn't generate any real tax revenue

This is a choice the local government can make. You can read Loudon County's (us-east-1 + everything else) explaining what it does with the data center revenue it gets https://www.loudoun.gov/6188/Data-Centers-in-Loudoun-County.

> it increases electricity costs for the region

Also a choice the local government can make! I don't know about this specific case but I suspect we'll see local governments get more sophisticated when negotiating with tech companies.

> and it increases electricity costs for the region

This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.

Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. If we charged twice as much money per kilowatt-hour for datacenter electricity compared to residential, it feels like the net revenue for electricity could be roughly the same to the power company, but then it wouldn't be nearly as annoying for the residents of the town having their prices spike way up.

Or, you know, the AI companies could actually supply their own power like I keep hearing tech bros mention is coming soon.

Possible and reasonable don't guarantee anything with big businesses. Around 2008, Atlanta had a major drought, and as the local government asked the citizens to conserve water, Coca Cola was bottling up the local water and sending it out on trucks. When the citizens complained, the government said it would cost too many jobs to stop the bottling.

You are engaging with a straw man that is literally the opposite of what I said. I said it would be possible and reasonable to mandate it, not intentionally look the other way, and not cross fingers and hope for beneficence.

It is the government that mandates things. Even in this article, it was the local council that sold them out.

> it was the local council that sold them out

You're still not engaging with what I said. Please see that "this government chose not to mandate" has zero relevance to whether a government mandate would be possible or reasonable.

I said "[datacenters] don't need to [increase electricity costs for others]. It would be possible to mandate...".

I said that because the person I was responding to said "a datacenter increases electricity costs for the region".

It CAN increase electricity costs for the region. It does not NEED to increase electricity costs for the region. And PREVENTION of increasing electricity costs for the region CAN be done by government mandate instead of hoping for profiteers to do less profiteering.

What this particular city council did with this datacenter is neither an inherent property of datacenters nor of city councils.

> Please see that "there was no government mandate" is not the same as "a government mandate isn't possible".

I agree with this, a government mandate is absolutely possible. But I am also saying that they will never choose to do it.

I wonder if the best way, and something that might be more likely to pass, is something like "progressive pricing".

Like the first N kilowatt hours are the regular price, and would cover the average case for most people (I don't know what the average amount of electricity used by a person is but the power companies absolutely know). Then the next M kilowatt hours are an increased price, and keep going as energy spikes up.

I think this could work just because this is how income tax works. Somehow that managed to get passed by congress and state legislatures.

> I am also saying that they will never choose to do it

If this article were posted when this campaign was just starting, this would be a top HN comment. Unfortunately, lazy nihilism runs deep in tech circles.

Well, maybe the next one will given that the one that didn't was just fired for it and now there's a lawsuit against the city and the developer.

You: "we should make this entity who's supposedly got the people's interest in mind extract concessions"

Them: "That entity seems to backstab the people every chance it gets"

You: "You're missing my point, the government could do it"

Perhaps you're missing the point. It's not that they can't. It's that they won't or they'll screw it up and defeat the point.

Thank you. At least someone understands what I was trying to day. You put that much better than I did.

It seems like both of you have thoroughly missed the context of my subthread.

If your goal is to point out that people make choices, well, you're in the wrong thread branch and want to instead reply to a different part of the same message that I replied to. Because I never said or implied that they don't. Quite the opposite in fact.

Here is the context of my subthread, extracted, in two parts:

Part 1, the framing.

> "I don't know if [elected officials think a wrong thing about datacenters] or if it's kickbacks."

You see, the kickbacks option is already there. We all already understand that it could be kickbacks. Therefore bringing it up further would just be silly. I certainly have no reason to say that kickbacks aren't a possibility. The only part we need to address is OP believing that [thing is wrong].

Part 2, the [thing].

> "I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region."

That distills to:

> "a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy"

That statement means either:

A (haven't): datacenters have in the past only ever brought nothing (and therefore they will in the future only ever bring nothing)

B (can't): datacenters cannot bring anything other than nothing (and therefore they will in the future only ever bring nothing)

And they're both wrong. A is wrong because past behavior does not imply future behavior. And B is wrong because in fact they can.

Data centers are high-dollar projects that sound great and officials are able to look like they're doing things to increase revenues, generate jobs, create infrastructure and put the community on the forefront of high-tech. Altogether, those are commendable increases, but the devil is in the details, in that all of those things do not occur at once and the costs associated with have a much longer payoff timeline.

Technically, it creates construction revenue and jobs. If you’re a municipality with FOMO heading into a job-collapse recession and someone offers you jobs on a silver platter, you might get fired from the city council for refusing it. So it’s particularly interesting to see that citizens would rather refuse datacenters than gain from them. (I certainly agree.)

Municipalities, at least in some states, can be sued for refusing development that meets existing regulation and zoning

If it's allowed by regulation and zoning, they generally don't have a say in the first place. These stories are never about building another box-shaped building in an industrial zone. We're talking about rezoning, variances, or otherwise preferential treatment.

A few steak dinners go a long way.

I think that they hear "$6 billion datacenter" and think that the town's economy is getting $6 billion in jobs rather than some foreign computer hardware company is getting $6B for computers that are housed in their town.

Property tax and (in some cases) utility taxes are deeply attractive, especially in places with large industrial-zoned swaths of land nobody is really interested in.

Homeowner property tax would be 37% higher in Loudon County if not for all the datacenters. DCs are a great subsidy for the county coffers.

> I'm pro-progress

I think everyone is, by definition.

It's the second thing

> increases electricity costs for the region

This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.

But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.

If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.

There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.

It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.

The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.

> There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.

Except of course there would be no complaints about the power plants if we did not need them in the first place to power the data centers.

> This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.

There are many, many others... You obviously do not live near ones, I live in Northern VA virtually surrounded by data centers and electricity costs are just part of the problem...

> gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible

Or it could have been a lot less obnoxious residential use with parks and shit...

> Except of course there would be no complaints about the power plants if we did not need them in the first place to power the data centers.

And you only need stupid designs like tiny natural gas turbines on-site because NIMBY and lack of investment for a couple generations on the power infrastructure side. I find it difficult to be very sympathetic to our society on this issue, since I've been following it far before AI Datacenters became the thing to rage about. It was coming for us either way.

> There are many, many others... You obviously do not live near ones, I live in Northern VA virtually surrounded by data centers and electricity costs are just part of the problem...

I have lived near ones. Not datacenter alley scale, but nowhere in the world is at that level where you live. I had zero issues with them, and no one visiting even knew they existed. I've certainly seen horrible designs that should not have been permitted or built where they are, but a 500k sqft facility in the middle of 50 acres is just... not an issue to live near.

> Or it could have been a lot less obnoxious residential use with parks and shit...

Sure. Building a datacenter in the middle of a residential area is a bit silly. But we're not talking about that here. At some point you need industry to actually build things, and as industry goes this is about as light and least impactful to the local environment as it gets.

Sure let’s completely ignore the noise pollution that makes living near one a constant hell

I guess their point is that of all possible industrial usecases, data centers are the least obnoxious one. I live in one of the countries that actually manufactures things, unlike the US, and I find it hard to argue with that. Any noise pollution caused by data centers is far far less than most industrial setups. It's the same with every other resource, water, electricity, effect on local shared infrastructure like roads and commerce, etc,. Other industries are an order of magnitude worse.

Given that you _have_ to have some industrial setup unless you want to import everything (tokens, in this case), datacenters are far and away the best choice.

I'll add a qualifier to the above, modifying it to say that of all industrial setups generating atleast X dollars of economic value, datacenters are far and away the best in terms of impact on nbhd.

The jobs argument also falls apart, when you consider that it's essentially 100 jobs in return for just an office building worth of space. If you want a thousand job plant just build that as well next town over, it will take way way more space and other resources though. The reason that didnt happen even before this datacenter boom is because most manufacturing setups are fairly infeasible in rich countries like the US. I can't imagine the response to a textile plant or a steel plant if this is the response to datacenters.

I agree however, that if you colocate a gigantic power plant, then you get the worst of both worlds. Fewer jobs and the hindrance of a big power plant near residential areas. Grid expansion being slow in developed areas like most of the US is not surprising though.

But this is pretty much the best case scenario. Tolerating the power plant until the grid expands is the way to go I suppose.

That's only if you co-locate a power plant near it. With proper setbacks and decent design, there is very little to no noise pollution for the vast majority of these facilities.

Most folks near them do not even know they exist. Plus you typically put them in the middle of a field with berms around them, or in a light industrial park. Not across the street from homes.

Trucking traffic creates far more noise pollution. HVAC fans spinning at optimal speed simply are not a problem for the vast majority of facilities.

Generators running during a power outage? Sure. But those typically are relatively rare events. Testing each month for an hour is just not a material complaint to me.

The cooling makes a lot of noise:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/11/data-centers-ai-ele...

Add to that the health hazards that come from infrasound:

https://popwave.ai/benn-jordan/blog/data-centers-infrasound-...

People know they exist because they had to dig new wells because the water level sunk or the groundwater pollution reached high levels

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/12/02/massive-data-centers-ma...

Since managed aquifiers are rare, overall water consumption is an issue, regardless of cooling system:

https://harvardsciencereview.org/2026/02/28/re-architecting-...

As for the data enter owned power plants. Did you know that 1820 (global) gas turbines power the datacenters?

https://www.globalinforesearch.com/reports/3130730/data-cent...

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