7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It will increase costs, but so be it. If you're going to build these things, then do it right.
A bigger problem, however, is that this requires functional government working in the interests of its residents.
[1] https://www.computeforecast.com/news/pure-dc-avk-europe-data...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12...
I guess one alternative would be to just stop building data centers altogether. But to me that feels like giving up on progress. I'd rather try to figure out ways to make data centers suck less.
Protest? Picket? Boycott? Hold your boss accountable for this shit? Come on, the type of person who browses HN is just about the only type of person who has both the desire to impart change, and the means to do so.
Data Centers should buy power at whatever the going rate of electricity is.
It is advantageous for some data centers to build their own power, but its not the norm nor should any industry be required to.
Whats next Aluminium smelting? Oil production? Big box retail?
Just because an industry that uses power has become the enemy of the week doesnt exclude them from market access. That should be obvious.
>A bigger problem, however, is that this requires functional government working in the interests of its residents.
It requires governments reacting to random populist impulses that don't fundamentally aid the community to ban random industries from the grid. Why not pressure the government to react to power price increases with additional supply like anyone who spends 20 seconds considering this issue would come up with?
Yes I would say any large construction project that carries a risk of negatively impacting its community should be required to mitigate those issues in order to gain approval. Otherwise you are just passing on those negative "externalities" to someone else.
Common utilities are common to everyone. Signing a contract for supply of power is what they should be doing.
The only "negative externality" is that extra supply might, in whatever jurisdiction this is, not be brought online as demand increases. That's a feature of however your polity has designed their power market. The "negative externality" was brought into existence when that system was designed. The same effects occur regardless of who purchases the power, including residences.
Not to mention that, it literally benefits you to have this generation on grid, instead of running privately where only the datacentre can access it. Growing the common utility is better than demanding the monster of the week goes off and sources their own generation.
Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today.
No - it's a real problem:
> While hyperscale data centers can be built within 18 to 24 months, high-voltage transmission upgrades often require 7 to 10 years to plan, approve, and construct. As such, data centers are depleting available grid capacity faster than it can be physically replaced. As new generation sources can spend 4 to 5 years in interconnection queues before coming online, shrinking reserve margins (or the quantity of power that operators use to absorb system shocks and maintain reliability) cannot be replenished fast enough to meet demand. As reserve margins shrink, the grid becomes increasingly vulnerable to shortages and instability. [1]
Data centers place vastly different demands on a grid than residences, and it's a bit silly to suggest that they should be treated the same by utilities:
> For decades, the U.S. electricity system experienced gradual, diversified, and relatively predictable demand growth. This environment influenced how grid forecasting methods, reliability standards, and cost-allocation mechanisms were designed. However, data centers are now entering the electricity system faster and at a larger scale than planning, regulatory, and market-based institutions can manage.
To be clear I'm not saying that data centers must be off grid. Just that they should not be permitted to destabilize energy markets where they are built. To this end, Texas and Viginia are passing laws that require large-load customers to fund the increased generation and transmission costs:
> To manage price increases and allocative risk, Dominion proposed the GS-5 “High Load” tariff, which would apply to customers with at least 25 MW of demand. Under the tariff, large customers would pay a greater share of the generation, transmission, and distribution investments needed to serve large loads (such as data centers). Although large customers already pay for some on-site connection facilities, the proposed GS-5 tariff would go a step further. For example, if Dominion must build a dedicated substation or high-voltage line to serve a GS-5 campus, the infrastructure would be treated as customer-specific, and their costs recovered from the high-load customer instead of through general rates.
This is a reasonable approach to me. Although in some cases it might actually be quicker and cheaper for data centers to just handle their own power generation (as was the case with that data center in Ireland) separate from the grid.
[1] https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/data-centers-...
Texas makes some sense because they are already disconnected. They cant reach interstate to make up supply.
But no, legally speaking, a business should be able to connect to a common utility. There's nothing impressive about one large scale business over another. If they want to tip in some cash or make some kind of deal fantastic. But mandatory? No sense making carve outs for datacenters.
The laws in Virginia and Texas are written with respect to load demand, not type of business. There aren't special carve outs for data centers, it just happens that most new high load customers recently are data centers.
If voluntary pledges were sufficient to fix the issues - that would be great. But they aren't (see earlier reference outlining the real-world problems), hence the need for regulations.
> But no, legally speaking, a business should be able to connect to a common utility.
Utilities typically cannot discriminate against customers arbitrarily - although that is more a consequence of being required by regulators to provide universal access, rather than some bill of rights guaranteeing electricity to all businesses. If regulators - who are (indirectly) accountable to the voting public - decide that they want to make some special carve outs specifically targeting data centers, they are probably within their rights legally to do so. (Of course I am not a lawyer - so this is just my opinion based on my limited understanding of how the world works).
And this isn't arbitrary discimination. Not all uses of electricity are equal. I think there are a lot of people who would agree it's more important to power a hospital, for example, than a bitcoin mining operation. And it may make sense to prioritize somes uses over others with differing rates, service guarantees, etc.
But I tend to think laws like in Virginia and Texas which target all high-load customers are sensible. That's really the root problem as far as the electrical grid is concerned.
I mean my local power grid, who I have had some limited dealings with, have multiple backups for hospitals, and suburbs with hospitals on grid are exempt from load shedding.
Meanwhile, everyone else, including data centers just have generator and UPS backup like anyone would expect.
>for example, than a bitcoin mining operation
Data Centers that might be carrying emergency calls to first responders are of course, not Bitcoin mining operations.
>But I tend to think laws like in Virginia and Texas which target all high-load customers are sensible. That's really the root problem as far as the electrical grid is concerned.
The only problem I can see is managing the onramp for solar and wind operators, who need special tooling to prevent unwanted supply. The last time we had a major power issue, they just bought power from interstate and flattened the curve immediately.
Onion Futures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
There's lots of things where it's not particularly difficult for very rich groups, sometimes even very rich individuals, to be able to afford so much of a thing that by buying it they damage opportunities for everyone else.
This is a known limitation of the free market, and why almost nowhere is actually a perfectly free market, only more or less free.
I dont see the relevance. Like we aren't talking about a rich person buying batteries to just hoard electricity. Presumably people benefit from telecommunications and aluminum products. If AI fails to prove itself, these datacenters are going to find other customers. The Peoples Data Centre requires just as much electricity as a private one.
We're talking about them raising electricity prices and cutting off domestic users: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-... and https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/ai-data-center-frenzy-is-pus...
> Presumably people benefit from telecommunications and aluminum products.
Most of the world's aluminium, by a large margin, comes from China; my understanding is that they had the de-facto planning permission requirement to have a direct connection to a non-grid electricity supply for much of their growth era.
Furthermore, to the point of "people benefit": the US has tariffs on Chinese aluminium (and PV, EVs), supposedly because the Chinese government was distorting the market. Saying "people benefit" doesn't mean there's no market distortion going on.
> If AI fails to prove itself, these datacenters are going to find other customers
Or just close down; it wouldn't be the first time the US had ghost towns when businesses fail. In the meantime, sudden unexpected higher energy bills.
Conversely, if AI does what it promises to do, replace human labour, the new equilibrium of electricity prices* is whatever balances human and AI productivity. Depending on how much compute this needs, and how much electricity this compute needs, and how fast new power supplies can be built and at what cost, this can be anything including driving electricity prices up far beyond the point where normal people can afford to keep their refrigerators running**.
I'm lucky enough to live in a different continent and enjoy both cheap plug-and-play PV and also the output of these data centres without the higher energy bills; but even I can see this is a massive market distortion, one affecting multiple levels of which domestic electricity is simply the top level of this increasingly suspicious Jenga tower. I wonder how much further it will go before it collapses?
* and human wages, but that's a different topic.
** or may force humans to accept lower and lower wages until they not only can't pay for refrigerators, or indeed rent, but also food and literally starve; but again, different topic.
Then, a datacenter comes along, effectively a bigger, louder, richer neighbor playing by the same lack of rules and outdoes them at their own game. It's only oppression when a bigger dog shows up?
That's unironically how it's sometimes defined. "racism = prejudice + power", as the saying goes.
We're seeing just how easy it is to get something wildly unpopular approved. Approvals are given in the dead of night, with little notice, over objections and by weaponizing certain legislation or government authority.
A great example of this is the Kevin O'Leary Utah mega-data center than the county didn't want so Kevin O'Leary went to the military, specifically the Military Installation Development Authority ("MIDA") to basically get them to argue the project was for "national security" and to override the county [1].
And here's what's going to happen. Most of these officials won't get voted out. Those that do will get some random six-figure job loosely associated with whoever owns the data center.
Basically, we're getting a front row seat on just how undemocratic and corrupt government generally is.
It's worth adding that a decade ago Princeton did a study on the effect of public opinion on what bills Congress passed and basically it has zero effect [2]. Bills have about a 30% chance of getting passed and that doesn't change if 0% of people support it or 100% of people support it.
[1]: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/11/utah-data-center-proj...
That's the way it's been since 1789. Each year, college students think they've uncovered something shocking.
Unfortunately to many people just take headlines and memes from terrible sources as to how they should think without putting any thought into it. Both sides are also vilified against each other.
I would expect this to become one of those things in the near future.
The side that fraudulently claimed the other side stole an election, tried to overturn it, and then pardoned people found guilty of treason made themselves the villains. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
This is very assymetric issue. Making it both sides are the same is just maming the problem worst.
It surprises me that these datacenters hum even far away from the buildings. Not too shocked about water but that also seems like a solvable problem by using dirty water, somehow keeping some closed loop system, things that people much smarter than me have looked into.
I thought there was a lot of work done back in the “open datacenter” era when FB and Google both seemed to open source their plans and tech and stuff.
It’s crazy that now more than ever there is demand for DCs but either they’re cutting corners on efficiency and being responsible stewards, or these are at some scale that still hasn’t solved some of those basic concerns.
When all these datacenter projects halt (as is their trajectory), at some point someone is going to ask about what to do with the unused GPUs. Those will probably sell to bitcoin miners or other new AI companies that know how to use exotic sources of power, though at smaller scales.
Very few people are affected by having a dump nearby or a nuclear power plant, whereas it seems like the power generators for these AI data centers really belong in an industrial park.
These data centers also don't employ many people, though I've read they are wonderful for city taxes, assuming they haven't gotten too many enticing tax breaks.
They also benefit from an AI datacenter, at least as evidenced by how many installs the chatgpt app has.
>Very few people are affected by having a dump nearby or a nuclear power plant, whereas it seems like the power generators for these AI data centers really belong in an industrial park.
Something tells me the anti-datacenter activists won't be placated by moving a block or two away from residential zones.
>These data centers also don't employ many people, though I've read they are wonderful for city taxes, assuming they haven't gotten too many enticing tax breaks.
And dumps do?
AI data centers are not in that category. Nothing AI is going to do (good or bad) for 99.9% of people requires that the data center that AI is running in is in the same area, or even the same state. It just needs to be somewhere where the internet latency between them and the data center is not too high for whatever they are using the AI for.
-- Loudoun County, Virginia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAliBRyq_1c
Look how close all these shrieking buildings are to residential areas.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Loudoun+County,+VA/@39.114...
There have been a lot of sins committed by the oil industry, like in Texas there are lot of leaking, "orphan" wells where nobody ended up being responsible for capping the well and doing the clean up. This goes back to the 1950s and earlier. I think things are somewhat better now.
There's literally zero upside to a community to building a data center. Electricity costs go up, there's noise pollution, there are no jobs, water rates go up and there is water pollution.
Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.
Put in place sensible rules around noise, locating in pre-planned areas, and covering the cost for electrical upgrades then let the market decide how many to build. Most people appear to be getting their information from TikTok and have developed a very ignorant NIMBY attitude.
To be blunt progress does get made by listening solely to those who get short end of the stick. Japan and China have good rail in large part because the central government can simply make the globally better choice over the objections of those nearby who lose out due to noise and other factors. We don’t need to do that, we simply need to not let ignorance win and instead regulate the externalities properly, and capture value for the public through property taxes.
Take Kevin O'Leary's DC. Massive energy tariff credits and propetty tax deductions and it uses more power than the rest of the state. So there'll need to be electrical infrastructure upgrades to get in gigawatts of electricity. You think Kevin O'Leary is paying for that? Of course not. Utah residents will be paying for that.
The blatant lies around tax breaks and subsidies are funny too. "we have to hand them out or they'll go elsewhere". No, no they won't. And if they do, who cares? Most things in life are a collection of positives and negatives. Like someone else mentioned fracking. It definitely has a lot of negatives but (IMHO) it's way more positive than data centers. I actually think AI data centers are strictly negative, meaning they have zero positives for the state and the communities affected. I honestly cannot think of a single positive that the residents of Utah will get out of Kevin O'Leary's DC.
I know this is a bit of a tangent, but fracking is an absolute plague, and I would encourage you to do more research about it's downsides if you think it is mostly benign. Aside from the better known ground water poisoning from leaks and dumping, fracking creates actual earthquakes that can be felt tens of miles away. My family has property that has been damaged by these earthquakes---in a region with no active faults where there wasn't an earthquake in living memory before the fracking started. Now there are at least several per year strong enough to rattle a tea cup off the table. A few people get paid, but it's a horrible deal for almost everybody else in the county.
1. Build them in the industrial part of town. I'm from Michigan, there are neighborhoods in our cities filled with manufacturing firms stamping steel and making all kinds of noise with few houses. Yes the real estate can be more expensive and sometimes needs pollution removed but there are usually willing economic development departments willing to help.
2. Make the data centers bring their own power.
3. Find ways to creatively help the community. Saw pictures of a data center recently where they created two huge public swimming pools that are open all winter long, There is a power plant on Lake Michigan where they heat all the sidewalks. Imagine waking up in the morning and not having to shovel or spread ice before going to work.
4. Find ways to repurpose unwanted buildings. Detroit wants to tear down two of the five towers of the Renaissance Center which is on the Detroit River. One of the towers would have the first two floors occupied by the University of Michigan which would offer training classes on technology to the community. The rest would be a data center for the university. Power would be two gas turbines on the roof. The other tower would be a partnership with Detroit Public Schools that would offer a dormitory for all the school age kids living on the street. Educate these children from 6-18. Most American cities have at least one empty skyscraper that could be repurposed as a vertical data center.
5. Repurpose old shopping centers as data centers. South of the Mason Dixon line where solar has a higher ROI you could cover the entire parking lot with solar cells. You could offer free or nearly free shaded parking, maybe even let campers have extended stays.
No, we do not. There's no prize to be won, nothing of value to be gained.
This is a concerning thing. Folks talk about AI as if it is a forgone conclusion. But it has yet to be demonstrated.
I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place right now. I work at a company that claims its people are the source of its great work output, yet the key stakeholders for my particular project are constantly beating the "AI, use AI" drum.
I've been trying to design a product that enhances our analysts abilities. A middle ground where the subject matter experts use AI to do the boring, manual labor kind of work that doesn't enrich anyone and just leads to our organization burning out junior analysts with overtime they'll never get compensated for.
But my stakeholders keep beating that drum. "AI can do this work from front to back."
To be clear, it can't. We've done the research to figure out that any sense that an LLM applied to the kind of work we do is only a dilettantism. It looks good if you are skimming the output, but drilling down deep there are massive problems.
But that story, "AI is good now. What did you try last year? What model did you use? It can do so much now." Is pernicious.
First of all, the models today I don't see producing anything functionally better; they just dress it up in better language.
Second, that's not an actionable software engineering plan! "Oh, just wait a year, the AI will get better". Sure, it gets better at not completely shitting the bed before you coax it into doing a particular job. But it hasn't been getting better at being actually insightful, actually delivering on what our people with very deep experience can do just by rote, just by asking them, "what do you think of <insert competitor>'s capacity to deliver X compared to our ability to do same?"
I feel like I'm living in crazytown. I evaluate AI capability much more than what my stakeholders do and they keep telling me "more AI!" If it weren't for my mortgage and my kids and my junior devs I'm desperately trying to protect, I would have quit months ago.
The building is not the hard part. The hard part is getting enough electricity to run GPUs 24/7. Old malls' electric connections are not powerful enough for that, so you are going to either spend money on new infrastructure anyway, or park a few natural gas turbines in the parking lot.
What exactly do you mean by "win in AI"?
They are getting wealthy off absorbing those externalities that come from production of consumer goods while we watch “Oww! My balls!” and drink Brawndo!
So are they (China) shortsighted? Or are they slowly winning in global influence?
This isn't a problem for the vast majority of datacenters, and won't become a larger problem unless the anti-civilization mindset blocks infrastructure investment that's eventually needed even if the datacenter isn't built.
Bad actors are ruining public perception. Either an industry group needs to form or self-regulate, or governments will do it for them.
Pesky Americans, with their rights and voting power!
Fracking is absolutely not harmless. I posted elsewhere in this thread about how I have had family property damaged by fracking-induced earthquakes. This is in a region with no active faults, with no record of earthquakes before the fracking started, and the wells are tens of miles away, not next door. I certainly hope data centers are better than fracking wells because those things are a plague.
We could have used the momentum to build new work opportunities and resources.
Instead we managed to mis-represent the thing so much that people won't even consider having a data center in their vicinity.
It COULD have been a good thing. It became a bad thing.
If you believe they are going to build their own power plants and water lines, I've got a bridge to sell you
A sibling post links to a news story [1] which I think is more credible and they measured the noise at 90db right outside the data center - which is certainly high. But they are filming next to a highway and a shopping center, which were presumably quite noisy to begin with. And both of the residents they interviewed hadn't even noticed the noise before the interviewer pointed it out.
They also show some footage from a different data center in the area, and it is much quieter. So sounds like it can vary from datacenter to datacenter, with this one being unnusually loud.
It’s the only 1 out of 200 in that area, so it’s not representative of what data centers sound like. It does show how you can’t trust the operators to do what best for the local community. It does show how a functioning government works because Loudon county increased oversight and changes the rules to stop another project like that. Setup policies to manage externalities, and don’t make ignorant bans.
"Theres one noisy data centre" ok deal with it locally and stop using it for your silly crusade.
I’m not against data centers, I don’t mind one way or another. But they’ve definitely not improved the neighborhood and have almost no positive benefits for the community that I’m aware of.
I’m talking about the data center near me, which powers a large social media service. I do not see any benefit to my neighborhood, and I suspect my power bill and property tax increases are subsidizing the data center, instead of the other way around.
Half the stuff going on in most data centres the terminally online crowd would consider to be human rights these days. But you cant calculate that element from Twitter.
"Whats the value of a router terminating multiple VXC's to me, jim everyman" well jimmy, what if you are about to place a call across that VXC.
Oh sure, you can make the argument about how it's going to drive sales tax revenue and create jobs and all that.
But then the reality sets in. The massive property and corporate income tax breaks and subsidies and land use variances that were all negotiated as part of the deal come to roost. The jobs aren't upwardly mobile jobs. The income tax revenue isn't enough to offset all the other breaks.
And you end up with a yolk saddled on the backs of the working class. Of which the bachelor degreed workforce necessary to make something like a data center happen gets treated more and more like a trade than a profession.
Back in the 90s when NAFTA was on everyone's tongues, something like a data center would have been a huge boon to the local economy. And let us be clear, "local economy" means families. But today, things like this study, show that people have no confidence the Invisible Hand is working for them anymore.
Then it sounds like the issue is subsidized datacenters, and the solution is simple: don't subsidize them.
These datacenters are like that, but taken even further because they're attached to an industry used to ridiculous tax breaks or lack of taxation in the first place, constant investor capital, and continuous rapid growth. Software production and digital infrastructure have grown up in a wildly different environment from traditional retail and shipping logistics, but they're taking the most successful (and harmful) expansion tactics from retail and shipping.
Unless you can kill subsidies outright for anything connected to a national or international entity and provide enough specifics to prevent them from hiding behind shell companies then it's a losing battle to say "don't subsidize them." They'll either force you to pay for them or they'll move somewhere that will, and those with a poor understanding of the situation will complain for years that everyone lost out on a "big opportunity" by refusing to pay for their own predation. That complaining can echo into local politics for years afterwards and affect the outcome of various policies, either by denials out of spite or misplaced regret over the previous big project, or by politicians being voted out because of their opposition to a Wal-Mart or such being built via extensive subsidies and an agreement to collect no taxes for ten years.
Maybe the solution is a federal ban on local tax breaks for anything not classified as a small business. Of course, such a thing would be impossible. But we really need to end this asymmetric warfare between sophisticated, global scale corporations and the comparatively podunk municipalities those corporations easily fleece on these deals.
Maybe a major city like NYC has enough sophistication built into their local politicians due to just their shear scale to be able to handle this sort of negotiation. That's a really big "Maybe". But other major cities like DC (even though AHQ2 didn't even land in DC, DC has it's own fair share of being duped) have proven they don't have that and time and time again they get taken for a ride. We need to level the playing field for local politicians, many of which are basically just the high-end middle class/low-end upper class middle-management type career people who don't have anywhere near the background support and army of lawyers that a major corporation brings to the battlefield. They're in it for either the backend deals they can make with local real estate developers or some quaint notion of "doing their part," either way they aren't part of a global scale Hydra beast with more money than God to be able to handle these cases.
All this feels like a heuristic (ie. large projects are bad because subsidies) taken too far. If the actual thing that's bad are the subsidies, then all your objections and talking points should be around that, rather than side claims about electricity costs or greedy tech giants. Otherwise you might actually be losing out on the good datacenters are a net benefit for the county's finances, as others have mentioned in this thread. It's like swearing off credit cards because "interest rates are sky high" and "they need to charge high interest rates because it's an unsecured loan". All of that's true, but it's also true that if you avoid the interest rates, credit cards are quite good thanks to cashback and purchase protections. By taking a generic "credit cards are bad" stance you lose out on the benefits of credit cards.
Maybe the titans promoting AI should NOT promote it on the "we will make you all unemployable" and "we will flood zone woth slop, what you like will die and you womt have a choice".
Without the years of sociopathic tech CEOs, maybe people would be more open to the idea of "it wont end up as pure power grab, with ai used to extract more money from me while making me earn less".
It wouldn't be surprising if a large portion of the anti-DC movement is being perpetuated by the same orgs.
Personally, I view the Kochs and Singham as two sides of the same coin and a major reason why Citizens United should not have been ruled in the manner it was.
It is what it is. Data centers are the one bright spot that has been subsidizing green and renewable energy investment now that the Trump admin is running the show, as only mass scale solar and wind can support much of the buildout cheaply and efficiently.
We can always leave for the CEE and India where their governments are basically subsidizing the entire capex for buildout. And then American and Western European HNers complain that "dey took 'er jerbs".
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
The arguments I frequently hear are:
1) It will jack up our electric rates. From the same people who will NIMBY solar and battery all day long.
2) It uses all of our water.
3) The dust and construction traffic is terrible and it looks terrible.
4) It’s massive and noisy.
I’m struggling because the only item I can seemingly validate is electricity cost.
There is water usage but it seems heavily tied to the electrical generation. Cooling is a one time consumption and annual top off. Which as I mentioned, these same people will tell you solar and battery are no good.
For the eyesore and size etc, it way out of town, when it’s done not many will work there, and noise, they’ve built a hill around it and it won’t use on site electrical generation.
I just don’t get the hate. The electrical stuff is a challenge but was going to be no matter what. AI just accelerated it. Maybe I need to go see some other sites to see how bad it is.
They’re loud and I wouldn’t want one running continuously around me.
The point is though, I haven’t been able to find indication that they will be used for this DC. Much of the drama surrounding this DC is because the utility pushed approval through then went had a $500 mil capital improvement rate hike.
I acknowledge the affect on electrical rates is a problem. But this DC has become a flashpoint in Michigan and I’m just not sure I follow why it’s so awful overall.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/no-one-live-video-shows-...