This is not a left versus right issue. Maybe more of a NIMBY thing. Co-locating natural gas power plants along with the servers near residential neighborhoods has not helped. The stories of electricity rates rising because of data center demand also has not helped.

People are understandably concerned by changes that promise private profits and public risks.

The groundswell of opposition and anger amongst ordinary people runs more broadly than many in the tech industry understand.

Here is famed activist Erin Brockovich railing against data centers: https://youtu.be/XpQo1yQCP34

I don't know how solid her arguments are. But this is the sort of content that is helping inform the opposition that is brewing across America and abroad.

Guess who organized these protests?

Yes, as a libertarian I was certainly quite frustrated with bureaucratic authoritarianism. But with autocratic authoritarianism now looming over us, and a bunch of people cheering it on because it seems new and exciting, I most certainly have become much more conservative!

As for data centers, I'm not against them in principle - I'm sitting ten feet away from my own rack [0]. But with the way the legal environment is set up - once something is built it becomes basically impossible to regulate - combined with the vice signalling federal executive that is likely to focus one of its two minute hates on your community if you do manage to succeed at regulating operations, it's simply best to just not give this industry a foothold in your own community. And while this is most certainly a selfish position (I'm happy to use data centers hosted elsewhere), it's all we have until we restore the equitable rule of law.

[0] I am against the centralized software that necessitates so many data centers in the first place though

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