America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments
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You’ve got a ton of water. A ton of famously cheap hydro electricity potential. An entire service industry for remote mines (who will build your roads and power). And you’re not being an unwanted bastard.
My sense is that the answer is very simple: because they can just use someone else’s.
The amount of surveyed untapped hydro potential is something like 110GW. Though to be fair I haven’t studied any of this too deeply since grad school (which I refuse to let my brain appraise how long ago that was.)
What I found interesting was that none of them had a single thing to say about the actual AI tech. Mind you n=6 or 7.
Whether they know who Anthropic or OpenAI or are familiar with AI tech is immaterial, they are allowed a say on what happens in their immediate environment regardless of the application of the DC. The environmental impact of datacenters is substantial, especially near residential areas.
> When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?”
Timmins? Or somewhere along the 144? That's not going to work: that area is pretty much inaccessible a good chunk of the year, besides you won't find the personnel to man your DCs there. And to hook it up you'll be digging fairly long trenches adding quite a bit to the cost of deployment.
Take a peek at Churchill Falls NL. They’re upgrading it to something like 14,000MW. You can see the hydro corridor on the satellite imagery. It goes for hundreds of KM to get to the customers.
I’m just not convinced that the frontier logistics are a real problem for an industry that’s supposed to be worth trillions.
I was just wondering where you had planned this and Timmins is the biggest population center North of Sudbury that I'm aware of.
Is it somehow not being represented here?
> Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second
A problem if you're Netflix. Less so if you're Claude, where giant clusters of RAM and compute generate a few kilobytes of text leaving the datacenter at a time.
But it's the lines between that matter, yeah?
Again, your map would say datacenters in the Australian outback would be insane, but there's huge dark fiber capacity passing through it.
> I also think you're massively underestimating the amount of ingress/egress traffic needed for one of these facilities.
Ingress/egress for AI compute is clearly different than some other use cases. One needs only to watch Claude's network activity for evidence of this.
(Like, it's the least problematic part of the in-space datacenter idea, versus cooling and maintenance.)
You keep trying to slice and dice the maps to say that there is in fact stuff in Canada. I'm not disputing that Canadians have the internet. I'm debating that it would be possible to put datacenters in northern Ontario and Quebec without doing massive infrastructure projects to run new fiber a significant distance, likely to Quebec City or to the northern US.
If you think that's incorrect, and that there's actually existing fiber that would support this, I would be curious for you to say so directly. Otherwise, the maps seem clear: there's some connectivity in the coastal and southern areas you'd expect, but nothing inland and northern and nothing at the scale of the US midwest.
But that's... already on the map, and you described it as "a major presence" upthread?
> nothing at the scale of the US midwest
Again, I note the very different ingress/egress requirements of AI compute. The main bottleneck has been power, not bandwidth.
If nothing works out domestically, this might very well be where the industry ends up.
The current attempt is to have domestic (in the continental US) AI - because owning the infrastructure is way more valuable than renting it.
That said, I agree they should put them in Canada and similar regions, it seems like a no brainer resources-wise for the reasons you mentioned. The reason they don't is probably that it's vastly more expensive to work on remote sites like that. Mines and dams do it by necessity, but it's a big undertaking to build stuff a full day's drive (or bush plane flight) from the nearest city.
But they also want to build an on premise 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain.
It feels like at some point our society forgot that the government is supposed to pass laws, and not just block things we don't like. Data centers are being built with polluting power sources, why is the instinct "stop all the data centers" and not simply, you know, require them to not use polluting power sources?
Also, while I'm glad you're focused on what matters, 90% of the outcry I've heard about DCs is about water. Or noise pollution, or them looking ugly... for buildings that, again, are mostly being built on razed industrial land or empty fields. According to the OP, "electrical grid" is the fifth most common concern, and air pollution is wayy down the list.
As far as power plants go, to march the current estimates for data center demand over the next decade are astronomical. A large percentage of that power generation is going to be natural gas and biomass. You can’t really build these massive data centers on the timescale needed without them.
Is it stupid lump in a small data center with these massive projects? Yes it is.
Yeah, I'm not saying I'm on their side. We shouldn't be building at a pace that can only be enabled by new fossil fuel plants, correct. But the problem is the power plant, not the DC itself.
I'm also not convinced that gas/biomass plants are the only way. They're an easy way, sure, but solar these days is very cheap and quick to install. And these companies have a lot of money to burn! It feels like we have a great opportunity to force some very rich entities to build out renewable power and instead we're all wringing our hands about DCs sucking up water and looking ugly. It's all kind of a waste.
EDIT: Also, a big reason for the on-site power plants afaik is because grid/transmission construction takes forever. It'd be nice if we could actually fix that, perhaps with all this new money flowing in, but y'know...
The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system (all the political systems that support it) and we should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach it. Public comment is one of the first principal components of the American housing shortage.
Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.
Also, electricity being publicly owned (as in: everyone within a town is a shareholder with 1 share of the public utility company with the ability to get information about its running, fire the board with enough votes, etc) would be great.
The common narrative is state-owned vs privately owned, but what about community owned? What if the people the utility directly affects were shareholders? They might be incentivized to actually upkeep it well and keep costs low.
And into this scheme when investment in new technology is needed, you then could have open meetings and plans on how the state / gov money is to be used, instead of going into the black hole of utility companies that are dramatically inefficient and corrupt.
Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.
It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.
With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability
This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?
It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.
The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.
Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.
Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.
A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.
I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.
>local political participation
Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.
We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.
I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.
Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.
I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.
The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.
What would we call such a thing‽
Even for emails and form submissions to members of Congress a 2021 study showed that congressional staff frequently review their correspondence records before writing speeches and drafting legislation.
To the extent that it is ignored, we should be encrusting legislators to listen not telling them to ignore comments because they skew negative.
That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.
Sure but it’s also the easiest, so from a cost-benefit perspective, it’s an attractive option.
> That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.
That’s a good thing. Giving people thw ability to meaningfully participate in the process beyond voting every 2-4 years is a feature. Even if it sometimes slows progress or reduces efficiency.
I will tediously continue to point out that this is not one of my hot takes; it's an extremely au courant policy argument in 2025-2026; maybe one of the biggest ones. It's hard to see how anyone could be paying attention to domestic US politics and not have confronted it already. Barack Obama dedicated some of his 2024 convention speech to it!
Is it possible we're just talking past each other because you're not American? I have no idea who you are and in these kinds of conversations one failure mode is assuming everyone's coming from the same political tradition.
Then you need to fix that.
If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.
But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.
To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.
But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.
“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”
He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.
The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).
A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).
This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.
Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.
If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.
You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.
Today is a Tuesday and it’s not a work holiday for almost everyone. So what are you talking about?
I continue to notice how many people are bumfuzzled by this point. It's not like I'm the one who came up with it. Public comment process being problematic is an extremely widely-held position among political thinkers and social scientists. This is not news. It is not a spicy take.
Early voting doesn’t prove your point; it’s the opposite of what you were alleging about elections! Not specific days, not a uniform process. Perplexing counter-argument.
Take an American at random out of this thread and estimate: how many local public meetings have they attended, in their entire lives? The reasonable guess is zero.
Should I speak on behalf of my young kids and say they might like to live there in twenty years?
This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.
???
What about “town meeting” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting)?
None of this is true for your local congressional rep, and certainly not for your senator. But those people aren't voting on local development projects. Your alderman or trustee or councilmember is doing that. If you haven't learned what they're about and how they get elected, that's on you.
(None of this is to say that you're going to get your way with your local electeds! They may very well not care much about what you have to say --- because they're elected by a bloc of local constituents that they serve and that reliably turns out for them. That's democracy! The good news is: you can often organize and replace those electeds. I live in a relatively high-end inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I ran a successful campaign for a friend there for $5000 all-in.)
Public comment is anti-democratic. It's an intrinsically low-turnout off-cycle process; it's specifically intended to amplify the influence of concentrated special interests. We have a democratic process already: it's called "elections".
It also doesn't make sense to include negativity and positivity as part of representation. Yes, people feel more strongly about bad things than good things, but that's everybody. It would be a mistake to try to excise that. It's already our job to account for it.
From your tone, this seems less like an opinion on democratic process and more like you just happen to have the opposite opinions of most people in the aforementioned segment, statistically, and you (perhaps understandably) are angered by them, and you see a viable argument for reducing their voices.
Some people have opinions that are perfectly human, but that you may certainly disagree strongly with. And yes, some people have straight up crazy opinions. And yes, some people have selfish opinions.
So... your answer is "fuck the people"? What are you even talking about? This is a necessary part of government. You are not the keeper of Correct Opinions. You're suggesting doing the thing that citizens historically get their weapons out to (rightfully) eject from civilization.
Also: you can't really blame those who do show up for a democratic process for having the wrong ideas relative to those that don't show up.
Public comment is a feature of the democratic process, I don't see how it could ever be seen as anti-democratic.
Not to mention hilariously conflating public comment on data centers (massively unpopular) with local weirdo NIMBYism on things like "coffee shops" and "fire hydrants". We all know every city has people that just love to speak at the city council meetings. Can't take it in good faith that you seriously think it's the same thing that's going on with opposition to data centers.
How embarrassing for this community that this gets ranked so high.
I just checked, and it turns out, so are you
I'm also not cynically and deceptively lumping "data centers" into the same category as "day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops." Think of the children! Think of the hipsters!!
You, on the other hand, are scandalized by the idea that public comment processes might be deleterious. Since this is an extremely normal thing for political participants to complain about in 2025-2026, my most natural conclusion is that you don't really do much work in politics (especially local politics), and that you don't share many of my premises. That being the case, it's perhaps better that we not waste time trying to convince each other of things.
In any case, your original comment is just a rabble-rousing rant with no practical call to action. "We should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach" the public comment process? Oh, OK. Well, we won't be, and you'll only paint yourself as a villain in the public eye by saying things like this.
I oppose public comment processes for the same reason that everybody working in permitting reform --- especially for housing --- does, and I'm relating an extremely normal take that you've managed to be scandalized by, presumably because you don't really pay attention to housing policy. That's fine! Nobody said you had to! But it's weird to get all het up about it then.
You work directly in AI: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...
> I'm relating an extremely normal take that you've managed to be scandalized by
It's extremely normal, and yet I'm not the only one giving you pushback. So maybe not as normal as you think?
> I oppose public comment processes for the same reason that everybody working in permitting reform --- especially for housing --- does
This article is about data centers specifically, but you've made it about All The Things Together, wrapped in a rant about the public comment process. You're saying that people don't see the "abstract upside of new development" and veto it for bad or selfish reasons. I'm saying that data center construction is a categorically different type of new development that has far fewer "abstract upsides" than the other things you listed and sees widespread pushback beyond the usual NIMBY crowd. The things you dislike about the public comment process simply do not generalize to this tempest of a situation.
You are relaying NIMBY talking points (down to "you have a vested interest in shutting down public comment", which is a first-ballot hall-of-famer), because you're so negatively polarized against data centers. It's a weird thing to be proud of.
But now that I think about it, I think either definition supports my criticism of your use of the term as a generic net for "you're wrong", like all the traditional one-worders in social/political arguments.
Especially in times like this, where everybody is more rabid than ever to kill the voices of the others, and people seem less able than ever to imagine or respect experiences and perspectives outside their own mindspace of "this is how the everything should work".
Every system we come up with to apply justice to some instance we are familiar with has the potential to apply injustice to instances we are not familiar with. We have to make those tradeoffs sometimes, but we need to understand the tradeoff we're making, and not get caught up in the idea that we are simply correct and people who disagree are one big unified enemy entity.
Apparently the developer was approached about the possibility of building a DC there, and it set off a five alarm fire of hysteria in the town. Of course, no one even blinked about the warehouse.
So now we are probably gonna get the hundreds of trucks 24/7 instead of the large quietly humming box (that would also probably increase tax revenue by 30%).
They should invest money into improving electric and community infrastructure. There are so many win-wins to be had and they fumbled
The problem with electric and community infrastructure is that very few electric infrastructure is owned by the community, but that's not the core issue because the other infrastructure that is indeed owned by community has people in the community split on what's useful and what not.
Imagine how difficult it is to decide where to go out to lunch in a group of people. Now up the stakes to getting people to agree on whose backyard and where holes and trenches and dug and electric poles and power stations are put up.
Make the AI companies fully subsidize it instead of government.
It would change the sentiment in the country in an instant as affordability wrt owning a home would be in reach.
Delusional.
Our main focus is building AI tools that serve city staff. We also create data from public, online data sources; in this case city council videos.
Data center development has reached a fever pitch nationwide. We started American Sentiment to help AI leaders, researchers, and the public better understand and respond to local sentiment nationwide.
The American Sentiment on Flock Safety is next!
Analysis: https://x.com/andrewfang/status/2117048211051532555
Findings include:
-73% of meetings had 0 people speaking in favor of data centers.
-Water use was the #1 issue. And only 1 in 5 comments mention AI!
-Elon Musk was mentioned more than Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Kevin O'Leary combined.
-Data center opposition is heavily bipartisan.
Helpful charts, thank you!
How does an AI data center make my life or my family's lives better?
I feel quite strongly that AI is making my life worse right now, so I'm interested to hear how you would convince me that a data center near me would be good for me even as I'm unemployed due to AI.
I can't convince you that AI is good for you just like I can't convince a recently divorced person that love exists or marriage is good or their spouse can be a fantastic person for someone else even if they were a horrible fit for them.
I am really sorry you're unemployed due to AI and the only thing I can really do for you is pray you find a good, stable source of income soon.
- File taxes and find issues that "accredited", "certified" entities missed. In one instance, my federal refund increased by nearly $5k. At $20/mo, just the refund is two decades worth of value.
- Appeal health, home and car insurance claims successfully
- Find out details of interesting plants without forking out tens of dollars for an app that claims to do the same but fails to do so most of the time
- Summarize never ending email threads with 20 disinterested parties who would rather not be on the email but have to respond to show they are "engaged"
- Write a convincing email to my mother in law why I cannot meet her this weekend and hold her hand through the tough times she's having with her ethnic neighbor who annoys her with their "ethnic" music and "smell of fish" BBQ
- Locate the user manual for my microwave and what that rapid 3 beeps every 1s for 2 minutes that starts at 10AM since the last 2 days mean
You might very well find these useless, trivial or even make your blood boil but my everyday life is vastly better due to "AI"
None of that is worth boiling the oceans to me.
Are data centers being proposed that use a ton of water? If so, why? Liquid cooling on the chip should just be recycled, and there are many ways to dissipate heat without evaporating away a ton of potable water right?
That should be enough to stop it. But not in America.
Also, just like oil is dirty, bad for the environment and kills people, so will the data centers. And the power plants to power them.
Our options are not to not have Data centers and their power plants but whether to have them built elsewhere (even outside the US) and pay rent or own them and get paid the rent.
Arguments about having more efficient or green Data centers and power plants miss the point. Engineering is a process of iterative improvement - you don't begin with the perfect product, you begin with one that crashes, burns and breaks some bones.
It's understandable though that no one one wants to be "it".