Backlash is just a natural consequence in a democratic society to the absolute accelerationist mindset that AI development has taken since 2022. Actions meet consequences. I mean it wasn't so long ago they were talking about wiping out all white collar work and consigning most the country to the permanent underclass. If you look at how the rest of the economy has been starved of capital to fund all this and how its contributed to inflation and job insecurity, it doesn't really take a foreign actor to spark a massive backlash.

DC's are being used as a proxy for power and wealth disparity. Fix that. Have an actual measurable plan for general prosperity (health care, QoL, housing, you name it) and the data centers won't be a concern

Aesthetics are important. Everyone enjoys looking at a golf course, even non-golfers. Nobody wants to look at a datacenter.

My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar thing for our distribution hub, it’s south of downtown kind of in the outskirts and in an economically struggling area. Same for industrial areas, it’s usually something that’s zoned to a particular area so residential neighborhoods aren’t really affected. It’s not land where the community may benefit more by literally anything else (sometimes even a Walmart is better than a datacenter). I assume that’s where this is all headed, cities need to roll out their long term vision of where datacenters fit into their city, if at all. Until then, it’s all these small battles and the information used by opponents doesn’t really matter. If enough people don’t want it, it should probably go somewhere else. This is not serving any community benefit so I don’t see any reason why it has to exist where the developers want it to.

Expecting rational opposition is actually irrational. They just don’t want it. The why is varied and probably based more on emotion than anything else.

AI datacenters have very real negative effects on the communities they are located in like noise pollution and increased power prices. If you manage to defeat the water reason then people will just start using some other reason.

A stockyard doesn't consume into the gigawatts of power.

There is not a concerted effort to build thousand upon thousands of stockyards across the globe.

Stockyards wont increase the planets reliance of oil, since green technologies don't scale that fast. Same planet that feeling the effect of climate change quite clearly.

All for close to zero upside for the surrounding community. At least the stockyard would have given you cheaper meat. What are data centers going to give? Discount tokens?

That's why your stockyard does not have the same pushback.

The biggest externality is the electrical usage. IDK why they keep mentioning water. The AI DCs are driving huge loads to grids, and all ratepayers are being asked to pay for that. IMO if they built a solar + battery farm on grid, paid by AI DCs, there would be no significant hurdles.

Yes, we should be looking into the wasteful water use in golf courses too.

> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc

This sounds like a pretty good argument against golf courses. Not sure why you think this comparison put the water consumption of DCs into perspective, to me it just puts the water consumption of golf courses into perspective.

> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc

Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.

Data center water usage varies heavily by design and climate. Most data center providers are not openly publishing water usage, and when they do publish metrics they hide behind derived metrics like WUE. So I don't blame the opponents for any "hysteria".

When we look at data we actually have [0], we can see for example AWS data centers in Oregon consumed 284,000,000 gallons of water in 2024. By their own estimate 100% of that water is typically consumed in the summer months of June, July, August, and Sept. These are also the months that farms use the most irrigation, lawns use the most, etc. Also, keep in mind that Eastern Oregon has ideal weather for evaporative cooling (specifically low humidity). Evap cooling is used for data centers in more humid parts of the country/world and can be significantly less water efficient.

The average Oregon resident uses 80 gallons of water per day, or 29,200 gallons of water annually. And if you calculate it out In 2024, AWS in Oregon used water equivalent to 9726 residents' annual usage. Is that a lot? What if you add all the other data center operators in the area? I don't know. Is they causing unrealistic pressure on aquifiers and the Columbia River watershed? I don't know either. Is the trade off of water consumption for data centers worth it? I'm not really sure how to answer these questions, but I think it starts with data center operators and their utilities being more open about their usage. Today data center operators like to compare their newest DC designs to golf courses and household use and it's not showing the full story.

[0] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/get-involved/Documents/2026-03...

As the xAI debacle in Memphis showed, once construction begins the locality may lose the ability to enforce existing laws around e.g. noise, pollution, etc. that normally serve to contain negative externalities. (This is a side effect of the rule that people who are rich enough are immune from laws.)

Since more precision remedies are off the table, all that's left are gross mechanisms like bans and eminent domain.

Nobody sane would accede to admitting a new community member who is a priori immune to local laws.

Please do provide your sources on the golf course stat you quoted.

I mean.... I don't know about where you live but where I am in the North East, electric prices have near doubled in last few years... the people are blaming AI and data centers for this, I'm sure it's not 100% the culprit but the people are looking for someone to blame and some sense that they can control it. Local zoning and municipal ordinance are one of the few ways small folk can assert power.

The public discourse for any sufficiently technical topic sounds misinformed to anyone who understands the topic well.

However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.

Perhaps you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 on here yesterday?

1. A concern is not invalid merely because something else is worse. 2. Leaping to influence by foreign state is non sequitur. What evidence have you observed for that? How do I know you haven't been sent by the corporate tech elites? 3. Focussing on water strawmans the other arguments against data center imho.

I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.

With patience, love and a bit of humor. X

my state power commission just passed a plan to build out 9.5 gigawatts of daily production that will be purely generated by gas turbines [1]. this is at the behest of paid lobbyists for the energy sector and commissioners who, according to open records, have received upwards of six figures from the energy company that is granted a monopoly over our energy here [2]

this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers

if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly

regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much

[1](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/georgia-power...) [2](https://energyandpolicy.org/georgia-psc-incumbents-majority-...) [3](https://rmi.org/resources/you-might-be-paying-for-a-worthles...)

There is basically zero truth about the water use propaganda. Liquid cooling is closed-cycle, just like in a car.

I don't understand the water usage fears. I'm much more concerned with electricity usage.

Nonsensical issues go viral all the time without any conspiracy behind them

Perhaps, just maybe, all the price hikes in electricity, city provided subsidies without any public meetings, and shady dealings (NDAs, encouraging city officials to arrest people commenting against the dcs, and so on) make people wary?

Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?

Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?

Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?

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