alt Hacker News> SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy.
Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.
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Oh yes, there is lots of money going to the places near me getting DCs. Specifically to the politicians who conveniently happen to own the land the DCs are built on or construction companies that are building them.
It's hard for the citizens who live nearby to learn about all of that when the idiotic SV execs forced their civic leadership to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Somehow, they just recently learned that was a bad idea.
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-says-it-is-going-to-stop-...
https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-to-stop-using-ndas-with-l...
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda...
The cartoon evil part is less about the data centres and how they speak of AI.
Whether it’s A16Z tweeting about how the value of all white collar wages is their market or Anthropic basically saying entry level jobs are done.
It depends on the company building the data center and the competence of the government approving the plan. https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/rural-louisiana-roa...
Someone ought to tell the voters who supported all the anti data center propositions and politicians that they're wrong and just imagining it not being handled well.
In seriousness this is an example of the previous point. Rather than engaging with the issue the tech/DC industry seems to think they can wordplay their way out of it by quibbling about irrelevant technical details and people are primed to get extremely angry at grinfucking type behaviour nowadays.
Lots of places don’t. Some spin yarns describing job creation and huge economic opportunities, which are largely bullshit, in exchange for large tax exemptions. In Alaska, the people get money, directly, not just some institutions. The oil and gas industries are notoriously uncaring about the people near their operations, but they recognized what needed to be done to smoothly operate in Alaska, and they just did it. There’s a lot of fantastic reasons to dislike the oil and gas industries, but that’l is what mature big business looks like.