I think it can't be categorized as NIMBYism because the underlying sentiment is not just no data centers in my backyard, but anyones backyard. It's about the AI project itself, even if it expresses itself differently for a local context.
But that all seems fine as long as not egregious. But for anything to get built, housing or data centers or what not, we have to accept that those right next to any building project will experience some negative externalities.
Personally I am much more concerned about datacenters that take it upon themselves to burn natural gas. And noise. Noise pollution can actually be detrimental to your health, and there's basically no mitigation that exists. So we really have to look at noise.
I know there are problematic data centers. I just want to know what the stats are vs. the rhetoric.
How many of X/Amazon/Google/Anthropic/OpenAI data centers have been blocked? I’m going to bet that number is close to zero for any important projects they were planning, likely because they were approved before the real regulation pushes started.
Both sides are getting played with the same song that ends in AI regulations, which is bad for people and good for profits.
It’s all strategy and theater so people can find alternative cause to latch onto that can be steered so it doesn’t really hurt the big players but will ultimately lead to more regulations (and thus more profits).
I get this isn't your primary point, but this line suggests people would have otherwise thought AI was good if it wasn't for some devious party convincing them otherwise. This is definitely not my read on the current environment. People think AI is bad because of its badness. The slop, the automated responses, the help bots, the being replaced at your job, and so on are just not popular.
- The major Electrical provider has a terrible track record for improving overall reliability of service to local homes. The average outage time is 3x the normal average, and the percentages for rate increases always favor corporate customers vs residential. Yes, Residential often has more 'long tail' cost in outage scenarios but it should be better balanced IMO. but also our grid seems to be a bit stressed and adding that additional stress is a big concern.
- The water usage for these data centers is an unknown, and sure they can do a closed or mostly closed loop but we aren't getting any promises on that. My state is lucky enough to have a LOT of water around it, but we also have awareness about what industrialization has done to those waterways and the ecosystems that live in them. We don't need more problems.
- In fact we actually have an issue where communities have newish data centers, that frankly have ggravating shrill sound at all hours. [0] [1]