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timmg 14 hours ago [-]
Obviously, it's fine to be wary of any development in your area. But it seems like there is a certain amount of irrational(?) fear of datacenters. And I really don't understand it.
I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe there is a political component to it. But I do worry there is some kind of manipulation being done.
recursivecaveat 9 hours ago [-]
I think it's as simple as people generally believe that electricity is good for the world, and AI is bad for it. In the former case you're kindof taking-one-for-the-team. Even places that have nasty nasty stuff like tailings ponds generally have a kind of civic pride that coal mining or whatever was a necessity and the sacrifice of their local environment made a lot of other people's comfy lives possible. Data-centers are just not going to inspire that sentiment lol.
razakel 4 hours ago [-]
For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.
> When low-frequency sound becomes strong enough to be heard or otherwise felt, it can cause annoyance, discomfort, and sleep disruption like any other normal noise pollution.
So which is it? Sure, I don’t really believe that there is magical super special harmful noise from a datacenter, but are these monster datacenters emitting disruptive amounts of low frequency sound or are they not?
shimman 13 hours ago [-]
It would be helpful if you didn't post rebuttals from people with a massive financial incentive to do so.
gruez 13 hours ago [-]
Ad homniems aside, is the accusation even accurate? So far as I can tell he doesn't obviously have "a massive financial incentive to do so", like he's a VC investor in anthropic or whatever. He does seem to be bullish on AI in general, but I'm not sure why that'd be a disqualification for someone on the pro-ai camp any more than someone who's interested in retaining their property values or whatever would be a disqualifier for the anti-ai camp.
danaris 7 hours ago [-]
That's not an ad hominem, though?
Ad hominem would be if shimman had said something like "don't post rebuttals from people who are stupid meanyheads". Identifying a characteristic of the posters that affects their incentives is a perfectly legitimate reason to discredit their posts, or at least call their impartiality into question.
pipes 5 hours ago [-]
No it wouldn't. I want to hear his argument.
13 hours ago [-]
mjmas 13 hours ago [-]
> That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
Wouldn't the question be more simply, Do you want your power bills to go up for the same power used?
And the nuclear accidents that have happend have mostly been overblown (apart from Chernobyl).
bonesss 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks to information campaigns people who live near nuclear facilities tend to have an above average, positive, view of the safety and threat.
A large part of my extended family lives near a large facility. Wind turbines launching ice at the nearby roads is a larger (yet trivial), safety concern.
helsinkiandrew 13 hours ago [-]
I don’t know the background to this project, but a nuclear project would likely be very transparent - with public studies on the impacts and meetings for the public to make their views known. It’s far quicker to build a datacenter than to increase local grid and water capacity later.
> The Stratos Project moved forward with far too many unanswered questions around water, power, cost, and transparency.
Tanoc 7 hours ago [-]
Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.
That alone is enough of an argument against them.
simianwords 6 hours ago [-]
Why did you not include the tax they bring in? I think this is a serious omission and points at motivated reasoning.
Can you do one where you account for the tax dollars and compare it to similar industries?
jrmg 13 hours ago [-]
In a town near me a paper plant recently closed (to much anger), then people protested the potential use of the land for a data center, citing concerns about noise, water use, power use, and traffic.
llbbdd 10 hours ago [-]
I have childhood memories of visiting my grandparents, who lived near a town with a paper mill. Going to town, going to a restaurant etc, meant being inundated with the horrible smell produced by that mill, within a radius of miles. It was a fact of life there. Genuinely hard to imagine a data center producing worse waste products than that.
gensym 8 hours ago [-]
It’s pretty simple. People think that AI will take their jobs and maybe murder them, probably because the people developing AI have said it’s going to take their jobs and maybe murder them.
Opposing data centers is the biggest lever most people have to impede AI development.
tgsovlerkhgsel 12 hours ago [-]
Aside from "moral outrage" style concerns ("AI is bad for the environment", power consumption, water consumption, or "datacenters benefit rich people, rich people bad, so datacenters bad"), I've heard of specific bad examples how datacenters (allegedly) negatively impacted the surrounding population:
- Noise (from fans to generators to possible infrasound concerns)
- Air pollution (from data centers semi-permanently running on generators)
- Electricity prices (although I don't understand how this is supposed to work)
- Water consumption affecting the population (water restrictions, price increases, water table dropping)
Many of these are one-sided stories told from the perspective of the residents that I didn't try to verify, but I suspect some of these concerns are legit.
The company building the datacenter has a lot of incentives to cut corners and/or cause some of these impacts, externalizing its costs (e.g. by saving money at the expense of noise emissions, running the DC on unpermitted gas turbines to be able to build a DC where there isn't enough grid, negotiating clever deals that benefit the company but screw over the utility forcing it to raise prices for others, using groundwater for evaporative cooling to make cooling cheaper, etc.)
The company building the datacenter also likely has a lot more experience while the people of the town and the town itself are doing this once, so there is an inbalance in experience that makes it easy for the company to get away with some of these.
There is very little benefit that the people of the area can expect from a data center - as I understand it, there are very few jobs in one past the construction phase, even the construction jobs are often filled with experienced travelling workers, and given the negotiation imbalance, a town seems likely to get screwed on any contributions that the data center promises.
Maybe the solution would be some kind of framework/organization that guarantees (ideally with binding, well tested contracts) that the datacenter won't be a nuisance, builds a reputation for being reliable, and in exchange, companies that work under that framework can expect quick approvals and less pushback.
Until that exists, or companies start offering guarantees up front (e.g. guaranteeing a certain power price or noise level), I'm not surprised that people push back (especially if the company building the data center has screwed up in the past).
timmg 2 hours ago [-]
All of these concerns are valid. But none of them are unique to datacenters.
A golf course uses a lot of water. A factory can use a lot of power -- and generate pollution. A chemical factory could have all kinds of externalities (if not properly managed.) Heck, switching to electric heat (over gas) or electric cars over ICE for an area will also drive up power usage.
But we don't freak out when someone builds a golf course or a factory or switch to electric.
We have rules about all those things. Sound is one: you need to be within reasonable limits. Electricity usage is another: power operators always need to manage their load and expand generation (that's why we keep adding solar and wind everywhere.) Air pollution is similarly managed.
I can understand if people are concerned about "infrasound" -- why not pass a law that regulates it -- like other noise limits?
Datacenters may have specific potential issues. But none of them are unique to datacenters. And we've been managing these issues for hundreds of years.
jurgenburgen 12 hours ago [-]
> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
explodes 13 hours ago [-]
This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers:
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
dgllghr 32 minutes ago [-]
So true. A legislator in Virginia finally pitched ending the tax credit that brought all the data centers to VA in the first place, and I hope it passes (I know it won’t). But seeing the upcoming rate increases already on the books and the number of data centers they are planning to build is pushing me to consider solar again. The payback time is getting shorter and shorter :)
skybrian 13 hours ago [-]
Could you share more about the rate increases? The newspaper articles I've seen seemed sketchy on how people were affected.
salt-thrower 13 hours ago [-]
The resource consumption is huge and it provides relatively little to the surrounding community compared to its intake. For most residents who live near one it’s a net loss. Qualify of life decreases and utility bills go up so that a Silicon Valley exec can get a nice bonus for closing the deal.
A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.
ajsnigrutin 13 hours ago [-]
They're big, use up a lot of power, destroy a large batch of land, produce noise and locals get basically nothing out of that (it's not like they provide a lot of jobs or anything). The power bills also go up.
yongjik 13 hours ago [-]
> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
Yay people have finally become rational about nuclear power safety !!!
...right, right?
LtdJorge 13 hours ago [-]
You’re saying it as if living near a nuclear power plant is bad or something
evil_buzzard 19 minutes ago [-]
I think everyone here is missing the point that while data centers may have may of the same negative effects on the community, THEY DON'T PROVIDE ANYTHING IN RETURN.
Just because you've sold your soul to Anthropic and can't feed yourself with consulting ChatGPT doesn't mean that these people are stupid or crazy for not wanting a data center in their backyard.
It's also a pretty big deficiency in moral fiber to object to people working against something that is good for yourself and terrible for everyone else.
The best equivalent I can think of would be CEOs complaining about how terrible it is that unions are allowed to exist.
627467 10 hours ago [-]
It's funny to see the fast switch from "NIMBYs are killing affordable housing and progress" to no datacenters in my back yard.
tadfisher 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the difference is between some apartment buildings and a 360-acre data center campus
explodes 13 hours ago [-]
If you're looking for actionable information, and don't want to sign up anywhere to see it:
If you don't want that land being used for anything, just buy it yourself.
newtonianrules 13 hours ago [-]
Utah hasn’t voted for a Democrat president since Johnson. Reap what you sow.
freedomben 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, there are no data centers in Democrat run states so it's definitely that
(/s in case it's not obvious)
llbbdd 10 hours ago [-]
Utah is such a special, creepy little standout enclave among the states. I've worked with a few Mormon coworkers who are genuinely wonderful people whom I adore, but they are, as a group, militant in a way that's hard to describe.
freedomben 3 hours ago [-]
You should at least try to describe it more specifically if you're casting shade on a huge population. Otherwise you just look like a bigot assigning traits to tens of millions of people based on a few people with the same religion that you know. I grew up Mormon and I've also lived and worked among mostly non Mormon populations, and I would say most Mormons are actually not militant.
Turns out Mormons are just people too with a huge diversity of personality.
I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe there is a political component to it. But I do worry there is some kind of manipulation being done.
https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?si=4XpIb0vb8YjY1g_k
https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=EB8zAF0JYHvOB23a
https://youtu.be/3VJT2JeDCyw?si=ak7haiWzbX9O8BL9
Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those.
Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.
Also, I thought the response by Benn Jordan on Bluesky was informative. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
> When low-frequency sound becomes strong enough to be heard or otherwise felt, it can cause annoyance, discomfort, and sleep disruption like any other normal noise pollution.
So which is it? Sure, I don’t really believe that there is magical super special harmful noise from a datacenter, but are these monster datacenters emitting disruptive amounts of low frequency sound or are they not?
Ad hominem would be if shimman had said something like "don't post rebuttals from people who are stupid meanyheads". Identifying a characteristic of the posters that affects their incentives is a perfectly legitimate reason to discredit their posts, or at least call their impartiality into question.
Wouldn't the question be more simply, Do you want your power bills to go up for the same power used?
And the nuclear accidents that have happend have mostly been overblown (apart from Chernobyl).
A large part of my extended family lives near a large facility. Wind turbines launching ice at the nearby roads is a larger (yet trivial), safety concern.
> The Stratos Project moved forward with far too many unanswered questions around water, power, cost, and transparency.
That alone is enough of an argument against them.
Can you do one where you account for the tax dollars and compare it to similar industries?
Opposing data centers is the biggest lever most people have to impede AI development.
- Noise (from fans to generators to possible infrasound concerns)
- Air pollution (from data centers semi-permanently running on generators)
- Electricity prices (although I don't understand how this is supposed to work)
- Water consumption affecting the population (water restrictions, price increases, water table dropping)
Many of these are one-sided stories told from the perspective of the residents that I didn't try to verify, but I suspect some of these concerns are legit.
The company building the datacenter has a lot of incentives to cut corners and/or cause some of these impacts, externalizing its costs (e.g. by saving money at the expense of noise emissions, running the DC on unpermitted gas turbines to be able to build a DC where there isn't enough grid, negotiating clever deals that benefit the company but screw over the utility forcing it to raise prices for others, using groundwater for evaporative cooling to make cooling cheaper, etc.)
The company building the datacenter also likely has a lot more experience while the people of the town and the town itself are doing this once, so there is an inbalance in experience that makes it easy for the company to get away with some of these.
There is very little benefit that the people of the area can expect from a data center - as I understand it, there are very few jobs in one past the construction phase, even the construction jobs are often filled with experienced travelling workers, and given the negotiation imbalance, a town seems likely to get screwed on any contributions that the data center promises.
Maybe the solution would be some kind of framework/organization that guarantees (ideally with binding, well tested contracts) that the datacenter won't be a nuisance, builds a reputation for being reliable, and in exchange, companies that work under that framework can expect quick approvals and less pushback.
Until that exists, or companies start offering guarantees up front (e.g. guaranteeing a certain power price or noise level), I'm not surprised that people push back (especially if the company building the data center has screwed up in the past).
A golf course uses a lot of water. A factory can use a lot of power -- and generate pollution. A chemical factory could have all kinds of externalities (if not properly managed.) Heck, switching to electric heat (over gas) or electric cars over ICE for an area will also drive up power usage.
But we don't freak out when someone builds a golf course or a factory or switch to electric.
We have rules about all those things. Sound is one: you need to be within reasonable limits. Electricity usage is another: power operators always need to manage their load and expand generation (that's why we keep adding solar and wind everywhere.) Air pollution is similarly managed.
I can understand if people are concerned about "infrasound" -- why not pass a law that regulates it -- like other noise limits?
Datacenters may have specific potential issues. But none of them are unique to datacenters. And we've been managing these issues for hundreds of years.
Data centers come with gas-fired plants that pollute the air and reduce your life span. It’s quite rational to not want to live next to one of these: https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-...
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.
Yay people have finally become rational about nuclear power safety !!!
...right, right?
Just because you've sold your soul to Anthropic and can't feed yourself with consulting ChatGPT doesn't mean that these people are stupid or crazy for not wanting a data center in their backyard. It's also a pretty big deficiency in moral fiber to object to people working against something that is good for yourself and terrible for everyone else. The best equivalent I can think of would be CEOs complaining about how terrible it is that unions are allowed to exist.
https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...
If you don't want that land being used for anything, just buy it yourself.
(/s in case it's not obvious)
Turns out Mormons are just people too with a huge diversity of personality.