Both are solvable with politicians who can be held accountable. But, in many locations, they aren't accountable and can only be trusted to do what's in the interest of their largest donors.
That's all ignoring the various other externalities... aesthetics, noise, pollution.
But, 100%, if a county/town has an underutilized industrial zone, they should build data centers there. But, it also appears data center developers prefer undeveloped plots. Again, also solvable, but somebody needs to do so.
Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place", you're truly left only with noise pollution, which is workable to deal with and its costs can in fact be taken by developer. Hell, existing industrial zones or ex-factory land is normally preferred elsewhere.
The US has a corruption problem, which is not exceptional - I don't know what place you're comparing the US to that doesn't give the rich money and the right of way where and when they want.
People say it's a "race to the bottom" without realizing what that implies. It implies that data centers will simply get deals in localities that will not benefit from data centers if other places demand that they at least pay for themselves. Why would that happen? It happens because it will personally benefit the people who have been charged with making the decision.
> Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place"
Again, compared to who? You think they'll have an easier time in Europe? You think if they want to build them in Peru that the residents will benefit?
Note, I am saying specifically on this topic, I am not saying there are no other kinds of grift available.
But I have done recently a deep dive and for example in Poland, especially in the area around Warsaw, a high power datacenter is literally one of the best investments you can get, and the only real issue is to force the builder to use certain noise abatement technologies to deal with the low-frequency noise.
And while it's a race to the bottom, that does not mean that there are no other variables than price - for example, outside of AI, a large boom in EU datacenter space is due to DORA and NIS2 regulations that place certain requirements on locality and resilience
EDIT in response to the below comment, since I've been throttled:
Noise and heat are outputs of datacenters.
Noise requires certain extra investment at building time but can be very much mitigated below 40dB. At mid-scales (12~15 MW usable power) you can have a datacenter pretty much beside residential building and it will be the quieter one.
It really is a bizarre place to live... it's both the richest nation in the world, but also uniquely broken in many really sad and confusing ways.
Pretty sure unlimited campaign spending (much of it without attribution via dark money) is a major contributor. While not legally bribery, it sure does look like a duck. Not to mention the actual bribery (747s and weddings for Trump being the most obvious examples).
A lot of the problems can't happen in popular datacenter-buildout areas in Poland because the local government cannot change anything about taxes nor can it give any sort of tax break and the most sweetheart deal thing you could pull is water pricing and that is also hard to sell. Nationwide rules set which government levels get what part of the taxes levied on the datacenter, and because of how what USA would call "property taxes" are calculated, there's considerable pressure for owner of the DC to get paying tenants to pay for them.
Even at maximum imaginable tax "optimization", a DC is one of the best RoI things a local government can have in Poland
Because if you're asking for them to refocus from data centers to corrupt politicians, I can confidently predict the outcome, and I believe so can you.
In Aus, when anyone makes an application to connect to the electricity network, you get charged for ALL upstream upgrades to service your load. That might mean new powerlines, new substations upstream etc. That both shifts the load onto the DC operator AND moves them to areas where spare capacity is available.
Similar thing applies for a water connection.
Datacentres still technically drive up spot price for electricity but with the amount of new generation coming online that will even out over time. We're building DCs like crazy here and the average spot price is actually falling.
You need a coordinated policy to encourage everyone to tax them extra, or to require them to put down money for new electrical infrastructure or so on before they break ground. It would be good to have federal action on that.
* Lowered property taxes by 70% by broadening the tax base
* Helped fund a new high school, hospital, fire station, water infrastructure improvements, and parks with taxes
* Directly created 900 new jobs, and created 4-6 times that number of indirect jobs (this is in a town of about 8,500 - so that's significant).
But the data centers have also created headaches for locals like concerns about air pollution, seizing private land under eminent domain to build high voltage power lines, and traffic [2].
So I agree data centers are a potential benefit to a community. But locals should be concerned and getting involved from the early stages to ensure their interests are protected. And vigorous debates, protests, etc should be viewed as part of a healthy democratic process.
[1] https://dor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/AdoptedTabled...
[2] https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jul/26/where-agricult...
But that's not how it rolls. At least around me, there instead seems to be a pattern of cities and counties of giving datacenter builds tax abatements of multiple decades in length.
And unlike something like a hospital or a steel mill or even a warehouse: After the local service industry and trades boom from the initial construction is over with, there's not much else coming out of these places. They don't provide very much in the form of long-term employment positions.
And beyond that, it's not like we know what the shape of information technology will be 30 years from now. It's certainly shaped very differently today than it was in 1996.
(And yeah, I know. If there were no tax incentives for datacenters in Location A, then they'd just build them in Location B instead. I don't have a problem with this at all, but some folks seem to find that result to be fundamentally unconscionable.)
> Data center revenue has also enabled the Board of Supervisors to fund the needs of Loudoun County Public Schools, including funding budget increases for the schools amounting to tens of millions of dollars year-over-year. This revenue source has also enabled Loudoun County to meet the public safety needs of the community, funding resources for the Sheriff’s Office and Loudoun County Fire and Rescue. Revenue from data centers has also funded many programs and services provided by Loudoun County to the community, including libraries, parks, recreation and community centers, and critical services in the areas of child protection and mental health. The Board of Supervisors has also funded capital improvements, such as schools, roads, bridges, and a broad range of facilities. All of these expenditures were made possible while simultaneously lowering the real property tax rate for homeowners.
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/new-albany/new-albany-...
Edge compute should be a federal build out IMO. It is considered a matter of national security, right? I could be wrong, so I'm open to discussion.
We build data centers everywhere of all sizes and shapes, they’re part of US Dept of Energy. Companies and individuals can operate them, plug into them like self-storage unit business model.
They would be powered by advanced nuclear, solar, etc. with loads of build out across the country (energy transmission, maintenance, etc.).
Why do we need to have power generation at the source (yes, it is cheaper), when we could do a large scale jobs and infrastructure project out of it that would keep folks employed for GENERATIONS! The demand never ends.
It might open up a lot of opportunities to have that level of localized edge compute, and historically speaking our computing and energy requirements have only ever grown. Give as many people (and communities) a stake into the future!
Private businesses benefit, since they build new things on top of this infrastructure. People benefit, because maintaining the infrastructure is a cost that's rolled in. Everyone benefits from it directly or indirectly (end users).
US Gov could print $1T+ bonds for this, and they would actually pay out in far more ways IMO.
They would and they should and that's efficient and good. The problem is corruption. If I go to a sandwich shop and tell them that $12 for a ham sandwich is too high, I can go from sandwich shop to sandwich shop, and eventually I will find one at a quality I can tolerate at a price I'm willing to pay (let's say $6.)
But with these corporations and billionaires, we assume that if we ask them to pay $12 for a ham sandwich, or even $6, they'll keep moving until they find a shop that will pay them $12 to take a sandwich. It's simply corruption. What they do is the equivalent of paying the cashier $3 to give them the sandwich and $12 from the till. They're shopping for the cashier that is willing to do it.
Markets based on supply and demand all work like this. Increased demand results in the market price increasing.
Electricity demand eventually becomes fuel demand, which has the same thing: more demand results in increased prices for fuel. Since fuels are broadly substitutable in electricity generation, all fuels increase in price when there's (significant) additional demand for electricity and that tends to increase prices of everything with a significant energy component.
Supply capacity improvements are incentivized by this price increase.
(If the incentive to improve supply capacity were present at the current price level, then those improvements would already be underway regardless of whether the world had ever seen a datacenter or not.)
Eventually you would expect a lower price, but that's long down the road. In the short run increased demand drives up the price.
My city has had issues with data centers since prior to the whole LLM craze.
The reason? They gave them tax breaks, and later on the town discovered they employ almost nobody. For the amount of land they took up, they give very little back to the community - both in taxes and in employment. It's understandable that residents would prefer the land be used for just about anything else. Even a pollution generating plant.
There are many reasons to oppose data centers, and not all of them have to do with data centers themselves. For instance: a lot of people don't want AI-driven changes to society tech leaders have decided foist on them. Data centers are the infrastructure for those changes, and a point of leverage against them. E.g. an agent can't take your job if your employer can't afford the tokens due to a data center shortage.
> Cities and counties can charge a high property tax to data centers and the residents can benefit. They might even give residents a dividend from the data center property tax. What's wrong with that plan?
There's race-to-the-bottom competition as well as skill/experience asymmetry between the local governments and the data center builders. "If you don't give me a tax break, I'll just fine someone who will give it to me. Isn't it better to get a modest benefit than none at all?"
~~bribing~~ lobbying also can do away with the extra money that they should pay
Last time I went to Costco, I parked over by the edge of the lot by fences with single-family homes behind them.
It was a busy time of day, but it seemed quiet enough. I remember thinking to myself, "Self, if I lived there, then the first thing I'd do is install a gate in that fence so I could just walk over to Costco."
And I've certainly lived in much noisier neighborhoods with far fewer opportunities to walk around and conduct commerce. I'll take the noise of Costco parking lot traffic over that of a congested 5-way city intersection any day.
Living on a steady diet of $1.50 all-beef hot dogs (with a Coke (with refill!)) probably wouldn't be the healthiest way, but I think I'd find a balance somehow.
You need to have a much more honest take than this and mention the real downsides if you’re going to say you’ll do it.
The road does calm down late at night, and then the grain trucks begin roaring again promptly at 0400. The trains only sleep on holidays.
And yet: I've resided in noisier places than even this.
Living right next to a Costco and being able to walk over for a hot dog sounds like a fucking dreamscape by comparison and this is a comparison that I feel I'm qualified to make.
And, sure: Costco isn't everything, and I often want only one can of crushed tomatoes today -- not 12.
But adjacent to the parking lot of the same Costco I was referring to earlier is a nice medium-sized grocery store. There's a coffee shop on the corner. A little further out is a Home Depot and an Asian market, along with quick access to an interstate highway for the things that the neighborhood doesn't provide for.
What I’m trying to get at is that while we talk about establishing a new datacenter or Costco or a rail line or a freeway, it often makes the living conditions worse for a group of people than what they live in. Understandably, this is the reason why people do not support them, even if, there was a little more money to be made. I for example would rather pay my full property taxes, than have the air quality, traffic, noise etc. get worse in my neighborhood in exchange for a discount on my taxes. And I’m not in an affluent neighborhood.
Sure. Financial reasons are on the surface, but finances are limited by my ability to make my brain work both normally-enough and regularly-enough to satisfy typical employment obligations. Maybe some of this could be alleviated with the availability of better healthcare and healthcare management. And while I'm very proficient at some very complex things, I'm a demonstrated failure at many things that others find easy or basic. Maybe a life coach would be useful (but I can't afford that, either, even if I encabulate the expense as an investment with certainty of positive return).
I make too much money to get meaningful assistance with any of that and nowhere near enough money to move to a quieter neighborhood.
Resultingly, I don't get to choose where to live with any meaningful capacity. The best I can do is seize opportunities when they avail themselves.
The most-recent opportunity brought me to a nice-enough home with lots of indoor space for projects and my own noisemaking, with a decent-sized garage (which is useless for parking in, but whatever). It's in a very loud neighborhood in a small town, but it's what I've been able to sustain in recent years. It's cheaper than an apartment with neighbors left, right, up, and down.
There's a bodega nearby and I can walk there in a couple of minutes. I like the place well-enough, but everything they have (other than addictive things like smokes, beer, and soda) is alarmingly expensive. There's also Kroger that is a good bit further out than I'd prefer to walk with groceries, but it exists. Everything else of meaningful report is in another city.
> given an option, would you move to a different place that don’t have the same problems as the current one?
Yeah, I sure would. Some previous person decided that this house needed lots of windows added, and they're decent-enough windows but they leak noise even when closed and latched. I'm listening to trucks roll by with the Jake break blubbing loudly right now as I write this, interspersed with the sounds of would-be race cars with gutted [whether intentionally or unintentionally] exhaust systems and occasional periods of relative silence.
Except for the hammering. That starts early in the morning and extends until 10:00PM or sometimes later. As I understand it, there's some kind of conveyor that gets stuffed up at the mill and hammering on it (sometimes, ceaselessly) seems like the primary method of keeping it going. Except when they use pneumatic vibrators, instead: Those klaxon-sounding devices come and go in their use periodically. I think they wear them out quickly, and I also think that I've heard them degrade and wear-out in real time.
My tolerance for noise is obviously very well-honed, but it would be nice if it weren't quite so fucking loud outside. The edge of a Costco parking lot wins on quietness in this way, by a wide margin.
> What I’m trying to get at is that while we talk about establishing a new datacenter or Costco or a rail line or a freeway, it often makes the living conditions worse for a group of people than what they live in.
According to my homework, this house was built well after the mill was introduced, and just after the US highway became a deliberate 4-lane concrete-paved monster that ran through the town.
Previous to all of that, and the land being divided up to build many somewhat-big houses on very small lots, it was farmland -- or at least, farmland-adjacent.
Things changed. They didn't necessarily change in the normal order, but they changed.
That particular Costco, too: That area was a center of commerce. It was gridded with residential subdivisions and cul-de-sacs and a proper school, but it was also commercial. There was a mall in that neighborhood. And that mall didn't stand forever, but the folks who really remember a time before it was present are mostly dead by now.
I regularly drive through an area of my own hometown with largely-isolated residential neighborhoods that were constructed because the recently-constructed mall [which is gone now] was nearby along with jobs at a plant a few blocks away [also gone] that made vacuum components before transitioning to semiconductors. My own grandfather played a part in developing much of that housing, largely to the exception of the parts that were instead developed by my own old friend's competing grandfather.
> Understandably, this is the reason why people do not support them, even if, there was a little more money to be made.
I can understand how people would feel that way, but I'm still all-in on living right next to a Costco. Seriously.
A datacenter of the type under discussion: Not so much. If it could manage to be quiet then it'd be kinda-sorta-fine, except they're also enormous and loud (cooling, gas turbines, etc).
I can't walk into a datacenter as I walk and buy a hotdog on my little jaunt to Home Depot to get some lag screws before hitting the Asian market to refill on cheap bamboo chopsticks, canned fish, and red bananas. The proximity of the datacenter presents only an obstacle to me on my path.
It's not a big deal in a car at 35MPH, but it's tiresome as a pedestrian to spend time walking past immense, boring things. The mind wants to engage with something, and there's nothing positive around to engage with while focused on circumnavigating a datacenter.
> I for example would rather pay my full property taxes, than have the air quality, traffic, noise etc. get worse in my neighborhood in exchange for a discount on my taxes. And I’m not in an affluent neighborhood.
That's a reasonable take on datacenters, but: I think you should reconsider this Costco thing that we've been discussing. :)
Data centers require very little personnel to operate. It chugs a ton of water and electricity while polluting acoustically the surrounding area and basically bringing no jobs
It's about more than money. People live in rural areas for reasons and data centers are rather antithetical to them.
If you want to know details, listen to those people
Is it though? Maybe the construction itself but after that running a data center doesn't need that many on-premise people, like it can be in the two digit range which is not a lot at all. And even then on-premise people won't be the highest paid engineer jobs but rather security and technicians.
Nebius is currently building a 310 MW data center in Lappeenranta. The construction phase employs ~700 people, and the finished data center is expected to have ~100 employees.
Understand that if the data center developers had not been so cartoonishly exploitative in their deal making in these municipalities nationwide, there really wouldn't be that much pushback. NIMBY stuff ultimately gets built all the time, usually because the money offered is just too good. Instead of using their massive amounts of capital, they struck backroom deals with local politicians to get tax credits, pass along infrastructure costs to other parties, and otherwise financially burden the community.
They had the money to go in and do all of this stuff without involving the public beyond the usual permitting processes; they just thought themselves too important to be burdened with having to spend money to make money. It's the "cult of the founder" mindset in action at the infrastructure policy level.
Data centers simply don't require very many people to operate.
During normal operations though, you would have a handful of technicians, probably a facilities manager and frequent contractor visits, probably onsite security.
The facilities contractors may come from far away for maintenance projects, so maybe you help support local hospitality businesses.
Most of the highly paid work at the datacenter will happen remotely.
Every so often, there will be a hardware refresh, but you probably bring in people from elsewhere to do those, if it doesn't make sense to have the onsite techs do it little by little.
Certainly, there's a lot of equipment installed, and any locality with property tax on business equipment should get value from that. But otherwise, almost any other light industrial business would have more employees.
Well, that's not the plan. The plan is massive tax cut, infrastructure built with public money and... that's it!