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If the labs weren't so aggressive with building datacenters in people's backyards, this could've been a different story. People don't like it when pipelines are built in their backyard either.

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Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.

For a lot of folks (including near where I live), "building in my small city" is the same as "backyard". The narrative is "Use up a lot of land, pay almost no taxes, and employ almost no people."

Don't forget "drive up utility prices" and barring that, "pollute the air with gas generators".

From TFA:

>The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.

BTW, the anti-data center movement predates LLMs by a margin. Near where I live the locals were upset before COVID - they employ very few people, use a lot of land, and pay little to no taxes.

It's just that they're building them at such a large scale now that you see more and more people protesting them.

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