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I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.

They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.

Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.

In Nashville they messed up by trying to build one next to the zoo, a beloved and popular attraction (higher attendance than our NFL franchise). The public outcry was swift and effective, new zoning rules were passed last night. https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/07/21/nashville-data-center...

It's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs.

I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.

> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.

This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.

Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.

Site selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.

Is there really demand for 4000 plus data centers? I have a feeling that's shooting a bit above the mark (10x).

> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now

Point to _any_ analysis that says the current building boom is anything but speculation.

xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too.

DC buildout is purely a gold rush. A play to be the one left standing after all the weaker players die.

They could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.

I wonder how long till they start scooping up old abandoned towns?

Yes, the AI Datacenters are much worse for the environment. xAI is using methane-turbines to power theirs, and they are allowed to pollute your communities because they bribed the Trump admin.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/elon-musk-... https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1014655584252361

Lol. A data center is no more than a industrial bread bakery (oddly specific i know). The entire anti-data US center is ran by China. EG. You can run a rack of servers in your closet. China is doing a great job.

> There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all

You have to be fair on this though. The time to ban something is before they start talking about doing it, not after. Being ahead of the game is never a bad thing, especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure. They just can't afford long legal battles.

My take is that people feel powerless to really do anything against these massive tech companies. This is the only tangible way they can fight back.

I can't speak for elsewhere, but a town near me has a few data centers, and the anti-datacenter sentiment precedes their use for LLMs.

They simply take a lot of space, and the city gave sweet tax deals, and they employ almost no one. The locals aren't happy with that type of land use.

> What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.

What's strange is that you didn't once mention the layperson's fear of data center projects in their county/state potentially raising the cost of consumer electricity. I've never heard a layperson mention data centers without mentioning that fear.

Have you really heard zero occurrences of that fear in your view-from-Mars survey of this issue?

It's easy for politicians to support a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody will really oppose it, and it's a safe way to appear to be "fighting for the community."

And on the flip side, I live in Fairfax County, VA and there are data centers EVERYWHERE. Especially if I cross into Ashburn (home of AOL and stuff) - literally mixed in with large townhome developments.

And the current plan - building a data center in Canaan Valley - is a whopper... 785 MW natural gas power plant on site with diesel generator backups (solely for the data center, not sold back to grid), 500+ acres of land, 2 million sqft initial building space, air quality impact assessment by the state is heavily redacted, $4 billion price tag.

All right next to one of DC's most popular outdoor/skiing recreation areas. The DC would loom over the two towns that support the entire region.

Most of it is anti-AI sentiment, there are already a ton of people who have lost jobs, or clients to AI.

What bothers me is clearing forests, sometimes even protected forests with the idea that they'll ask for forgiveness instead of permission.

Does a data center need to be an immediate neighbor to raise electricity rates or consume water capacity?

Data centers are conflated with rising energy costs.

It's partly about people's nominal objections, but mostly an attempt to hold them hostage to extract some energy bill subsidies (and general cost of living relief).

If you look at Elk Grove Village, Illinois as their budget there after declaring they would become the AI Datacenter Capital of the World -- there is an obvious answer:

Suburbs cannot continue to pay for their infrastructure without drastically increasing taxes or finding new sources of income.

> There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.

How did they get in?

I hear and understand those, but why isn't it a regulation or requirements issue?

Ambient noise must be contained, excess heat must be mitigated, free hot water must be provided to nearby buildings. etc. Also this is a city's opportunity to do something like assess penalty tax points. (ie, datacenter usage tax, just like we do to hotels)

Why is that a problem? It might raise the temp within a few hundred feet of the chillers by 0.5-1F which is substantially less than an urban heat island temp delta vs surrounding rural land.

A sane municipality will require sound mitigation on generators, chillers, and other loud equipment. Sure, there are shitty places that don’t take care of their citizens that will let you run natural gas turbines to generate power, but it’s possible to contain the bad effects of data centers with local and state regulations.

I’ll take a data center that evaporates water to replace the iron casting foundry in my neighborhood any day.

There's also a lot of people lashing out without knowing anything about data centers because they think AI is loser shit, and data centers have become a rallying point.

Your edit really illustrates what's wrong with all of this. We can't even get computers to reasonably assume what we're trying to say. But somehow the ultra rich have decided to devote all global resources to doing bad autocorrect for everything everywhere and calling it AI.

> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

This comes cross as unbelievable, and at worst a fantastical statement, as someone who lives in Northern Virginia and is effectively watching the Datacenter battle unfold from the front lines, and dealing with the local politics and electricity costs rising at a precipitous rate.

Our electricity bill has doubled. Loudoun County Board of Supervisors want to erect “Statue of Liberty” sized power transmission lines, and those that want data centers are doing their damndest to somehow claim that they’re not responsible for the rise in the cost of utilities and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.

Part of the reason people care about Datacenters now is that they’re starting to litter the landscape, take resources from local municipalities, and raise costs for everyone involved, whereas previously there were not enough of them to really move the needle as being a problem.

Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”.

> No one ever cared about DCs before now.

This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy.

> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here.

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...

For those who are unaware of the claims of Chinese influence, a couple articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/husband-code-pink-founder-nevil...

Previous coverage of Singham, who coincidentally is married to a co-founder of Code Pink:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...

Not saying these are correct and are proof, but this isn't some fringe concern from the MAGA crowd or something. It would also be a logical response on China's part to the US working to block them from getting GPUs, processor tech, etc.

People seem pretty sour on big tech in general, maybe it's because, I don't know...

Data centers being directly tied to increases in our power bills.

Or CEOs talking about how they're going to get to fire everyone because of AI.

Or social media raising the political temperature.

Or all of them combined. Tech has never been so intolerable across the board.

I think its a proxy for general populist sentiment.

"These AI people are getting rich selling unicorn farts while I'm on the same pay and everything is more expensive, fuck them".

The US nationalized tik tok so the chinese couldn't influence people anymore. Apparently that didn't work?

>No one ever cared about DCs before now.

Fewer people cared, sure.. but it's because until recently they weren't eclipsing power consumption of extremely energy-heavy industries, noticeably driving local residential energy prices up.

They also weren't so heavily noise polluting nor were they typically built in places where their noise pollution affected so many people.

> No one ever cared about DCs before now.

Just because you were not looking doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Anti-DC sentiment has been high in some places before LLMs came on to the scene. Even HN has had multiple submissions of towns in rural areas fighting not to let Meta (or similar companies) build datacenters in their town.

(On the flip side, I know at least one town that welcomed them!)

> No one ever cared about DCs before now.

Society hasn't felt the very real effects of data centers until recently. Power supply being short meant that residential customers have had to pick up the tab for heavy industrial users. We've started to learn just how bad all those dams we built are for the environment and many of them are tied to data center money. Elon Musk waltzed into Memphis and stood up a natural gas data center that has basically poisoned the surrounding area.

Maybe nation state actors are helping, that can always be true. It is also true that the American people are starting to realize they've been had many times over and are just starting to ask for a better deal. I think we should listen.

The data center construction boom has precipitated a lot of inflation in electronics and related fields, because the data centers are buying out all of the silicon manufacturing and RAM manufacturing and etc, and all of this stuff is horribly supply-limited. And the people pushing for data center construction are proudly telling us that we need to support this so that we can put half of the population out of work, oh, and we just need a small trillion-dollar subsidy or five to pay for it all (because demand for AI isn't high enough to pay for all of it themselves).

There's no need to invent some malign foreign conspirator to generate unpopularity for this stuff. No, the AI companies are led by unpopular CEOs, who are making unpopular statements (almost cartoonishly so). And opposing a data center is the kind of action that regular people, upset about this sort of stuff, feel that they can actually meaningfully effect. So of course it was going to balloon like it has.

I made this comment a little bit ago, I'll share it again:

I think the biggest change in public sentiment in datacenters is a reaction to the extreme scale they're being deployed at these days. They're really vastly unlike datacenters of the past. The power densities are so much higher, they're so much larger, and they're getting vastly more environmental waivers and tax subsidies than ever before.

A quiet, average-sized warehouse-like building in an industrial area with a big power substation next to it often didn't bother a lot of people. A giant monster of a building being built in what was previously people's backyards with howling on-site power generation that got installed without any kind of air quality reviews because they're allegedly "temporary" and starts sucking the groudwater dry is a whole different story.

This is a datacenter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pzSsUHXPaUuLGaDa9 I doubt many people even know its a datacenter. Its pretty much any other office building.

This is also a datacenter. I imagine just about everyone living nearby knows its a datacenter. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wR4NgcWQVhJAy5Gy6

Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree there's a lot of social media frenzy in reaction to all datacenters. There are a lot of datacenters around me, and it seems like roughly nobody cared when they were built. They've been there for years, some have been operational for decades. Suddenly now, lots of people have a problem with all of them.

Wow it's almost like modern datacenters use way more power due to GPU consumption. Emit way more pollution. Use way more land. Make way more noise. Produce slop instead of functioning products. Do yall use your brain before chiming in and misinforming everyone?

> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.

They probably would be awful to have a house next to, but which if the hyperscale data center proposals are near residential areas?

The really large data centers have to go into areas with a lot of land and utility connections. These are usually zoned commercial or industrial already.

There is a study from ASU that found they are awful to live within....1200ft of.

I don't want a data center in my back yard because I do want housing in my back yard.

Once a data center shows up, that plot of land is locked out of more productive development for decades.

The article puts that percentage at 39%, which falls a bit short of “most” but is frighteningly high.

What kind of reason would you possibly have to write the sentence you did?

Why did you?

The whole world is California, and the most important thing we can do is pack more and more people into the same space. People from here, people from there. We want more crowdedness, and everyhing that comes with it: crime, noise, pollution, lack of social cohesion. Everything. Every place must be like this, and everything must grow forever.

It's a long-standing tradition. Our forefathers famously said "NIMBY" to taxation without representation.

There's more to it than that. They're not just obnoxious to exist in the vicinity of, they also drive up local energy prices.

It's generally more expensive for them when it comes to things like power, water and internet.

Boonies have very poor in each of those and building it up would take too long so throw another in Northern Virginia since they have expensive access to additional of that but at least it will become operational.

And ruin the boonies too? American norms and laws are not conducive to making nice places to live, but they've skated by having enough land and car-first infrastructure. With the huge increase in warehouses and data centers in residential areas over the past 5-10 years, I wonder if there will be an inflection point where it finally needs to be dealt with.

Even then they can wind up in the proverbial backyard. I don't know much about data center staffing needs and zoning laws but those would seem relevant spatial constraints and considerations.

I wonder the same thing. It could be that getting transition grid interconnects and redundant fiber paths is much faster in more suburban areas vs rural areas.

I agree with you, but even then it's still going to be someone's backyard

We could in a vacuum, but they require human labor and human labor isn't found in the boonies.

It's the age old problem. The people in the cities cry that there are no jobs and the rural businesses cry that they can't find anyone to hire, with no great resolution as the businesses cannot afford to move into the city and the people don't want to travel to the boonies.

However, in this case, these data centers are so well capitalized that they can afford to move them into the cities right beside where the workers are located.

I propose we build one under Sam Altman's house.

They need to hire IT, maintainence, and security to run the datacenters, and there aren't many qualified people in the boonies. Small towns are better targets, and honestly also just objectively less damaging to the environment.

None of this NIMBYism is about the datacenter itself, it's all a protest against AI making the economy really shitty for them.

A park, a public recreation centre, an elementary school, a cute coffee shop…

You know, human stuff.

I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.

It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.

Just require them to also pay for a new local power plant with the capacity to cover them before they get building permits, honestly. Maybe say they can't qualify for tax breaks too?

Absolutely this. If you think about different types of objections to nearby data centers and do some pretty minimal research, you come up with a reasonable set of solutions that most people would agree on.

That's not what people are doing though. People are genuinely afraid for the future, and much of the data center backlash is driven by emotion. You can see this reflected in populist political movements. People have a (well-founded) sense that those in power don't have their interests in mind and they're lashing out without much thought.

>Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).

It's cheaper this way.

Oh yeah right, underground data centers. What are you going to say next, data centers in space? Be real.

Your two friends are factually correct. You somehow misinterpret how much water they consume.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage

Ok, then how about above? Elon and friends want to launch them all into orbit.

You definitely do not want a sewage treatment plant in your backyard. But hey, you got a cheaper home price so that the rich guys can pump their crap to your backyard from miles away.

This is about property rights and freedoms.

Your property rights stop where my ears are. Or I have the freedom to not listen to your gas turbine. Or however one wishes to flip that on its head. Whether you own the property or not, that property isn’t in a vacuum.

> IMO NIMB should be illegal, so long as the builder meets standards.

NIMB is part of setting those standards.

In a nearby town, the city was planning on putting a moratorium on new data centers, and so a lot of companies rushed their application in before the moratorium start date. They all got approved. The local citizens got really mad that they were approved, and the city simply said "Look: We legally cannot deny them permits if they're conforming to current requirements."

So yes, you're right. And yes, your statement is mostly irrelevant. NIMBYism is always about the future requirements. It's not as if enacting a rule disallowing high density residences will force existing ones to be torn down.

Rather than making everyone comply with the strictest noise and other restrictions of residential areas, it's much easier for everyone if you put industrial things in an industrial area and residences in a residential area.

Good luck upgrading your home’s electrical service to charge an EV, only to be told it’s impossible because the nearby data center has already consumed all the available grid capacity.

Happened to family of mine. Not in the US though. They charge their EV with a 3kW charger now.