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Comment by llbeansandrice | Hacker News Reader

If you cannot see the fundamental difference between building datacenters that suck power, provide no local jobs, are a nuisance, and can be located almost anywhere and housing for people I simply don’t know what to tell you.

Your point is that the arguments are topologically similar but you are ignoring the impacts.

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The impacts of data centers on people living nearby are basically nothing, and pretty much all anti-data-center-sentiment is driven by misinformed or willfully-delusional people. Even the idea that it's a problem that data centers "provide no local jobs" is crazy - there are all sorts of built structures that provide no local jobs because they simply have nothing to do with a business that hires employees, the idea that a data center doing much the same thing justifies making it illegal to build is crazy.

I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.

If data centres were forced to contribute what was required to build the utility infrastructure required to support them, that might be true. For example, electricity costs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/27/electrici...

Datacentres are generally built where poor people live. If you are on minimum wage and suddenly someone increases your electricity bill by $300 because of data centres, on top of all the other increases tied to things like energy insecurity... I can understand why people would consider that an impact.

Data centers are very noisy, would you live next to one?

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