The article is interesting, but I think it dances around what should be a central point, only approaching it obliquely. A lot of the opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors.
> My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
Essentially, I think there's a proximal reputational problem for AI companies, which the article calls out, but the ultimate problem is factual. It's not an education/communication/negotiation issue, because the real problem is the underlying reality. The wolf at the door being distrusted is because it's a wolf, not PR.
The other part is: if there really is so much money in these, it should be easy for the companies to produce an actually good deal. Everyone can tell (after all these experiences) what bullshit smells like, when the deals are full of tricks. Why try the tricks--property taxes that pay eventually, jobs that will show up eventually, promises that electric bills won't go up--when you could guarantee the results, and guarantee the town won't be left holding the bag?
Well of course it's because the companies think they don't have to give a good deal. That they can get away with it.
One wonders if at this point they would have saved money not trying to fuck people over to get what they wanted. I hope so. The ideal world has companies doing things the honest way because it's honest, but I'd settle for them doing it that way because they're economically incentivized to do so.
mostly unrelated but amusing: I keep getting fliers from Google fiber trying to get me to switch. Every one has this one bizarre line in it: "our customers have never had their rates go up!"---as if I am too stupid to realize that is not a promise. Now, I have no idea if that works on other people. Maybe enough other people are stupid and don't notice that that's not a promise that turns out to be good ad copy. But I am personally so put off by the disrespectful attempt at manipulation that I consider switching less, even though it might well save me money. It is significantly worse for them, as a sales tactic, than if they had written nothing there at all.
"We can't trust them" is the foundation of practically every conspiracy theory, though, from times immemorial. I remember people protesting against cell towers, and it was exactly what their arguments were built around: "We don't believe this thing won't fry our brains". It was the same before with electrical lines, and I guess steam power had its share too. Not telling a concerned citizen is obliged to trust everyone, marketing & propaganda were part of "underlying reality" for centuries at least. But frankly, you made it sound like it's a novel thing, a dark omen of evil AI times, or something.
As you say, the distrust is backed up by evidence and by their own personal experience of the same promises getting trotted out time after time, generation after generation.
These people, these communities, have been promised these same things before (or things adjacent to them) and have seen them not deliver, or even make their situation worse.
This is especially true of the tax income and job generation elements. The estimates provided as part of the deal are utterly divorced from reality- people know it and refuse to take part in the kayfabe that surrounds it.
I have a property in NW Wisconsin. It's incredibly poor there - it seems like most people working age are on disability - the new form of welfare. Money is earned mostly in summer and hunting seasons. It's pretty depressing. Lots of alcohol problems. I hired someone to clear some trees and make lumber out of them once and he showed up for the job three months later. At least he showed up though. Weirdest thing - he never came back after the job to get paid. I end up often hiring contractors from 90 miles away to get good ones.
But a data center wouldn't help. It would raise electric prices and doesn't really employ people.
It's kind of like one industry that is in the area - there's a company that grows huge amounts of cranberries but its mostly automated. As far as I know only three people work on this huge site. They let the cranberries grow, flood the area when they're ready. The cranberries float to the top for robots to skim the surface and harvest them. The humans just move things around for the robots.
City taxes don't fix a broken economic flywheel. State taxes go to others and also don't fix it. You need a functional economy with jobs, income, spending and all that jazz. A small amount of taxes with no second order benefits is worth relatively little.
Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".
TFA cites "Each project requires thousands of skilled workers during the two to six year construction period (nearly 10,000 in Mount Pleasant)" so maybe it's not totally fiction (at least during build time).
To me that's not sustainable. It just brings in outside workers, distorts the economy in bad way for locals through increased costs, distorts their daily life in a bad way and then it all goes away leaving a void in its wake. Like the olympics.
My sister dates a guy who works on these kinds of projects. He’s based out of Chicago, and goes to remote places like Idaho or Ohio to build them. They put him up in cheap temporary housing, I guess that generates some local money, but he’s very quickly moving on to the next job. They’re not hiring locals for these tasks, they don’t have the skills. The people who are benefitting are mostly local landlords.
A school and hospital would do that more than a data center tho. Look at Merced California, used to be a nowhere destination. They built a UC there and now it’s a place students, PhDs and MDs from around the world want to move to. If UC Merced were a data center it would attract no one, it would drain and pollute the lake, and Merced CA would still be a nowhere destination.
We’re talking about rural Wisconsin - there is no world where you need to make a trade off between having school and a data center. Put a school in one field and a data center in a field further away. It just seems like you should tax the data center and then build a school or whatever else you think would help the local economy.
I don’t know about Wisconsin, but Merced was rural California, the only thing it had going for it was land and proximity to a highway. 10 minutes out and there’s no cell service, and the sky is dark enough to see the Milky Way. Still there’s a huge meth and homeless problem. Anyway, a data center turns the whole town into an industrial zone because of the sound and water pollution — no one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere.
A good portion of this movement is irrational and driven by viral media. Last week a coworker was talking about how unbearably loud data centers are. I asked them if our parking lot is loud. (There’s a decent sized server floor in our building and a bunch of cooling equipment in the parking lot.) They had never noticed the cooling system.
On the other hand, my city gave the local data centers big tax breaks to come here. In the last couple years my property taxes have increased significantly along with my electricity bill. It seems obvious that I’m subsidizing the local data center. There’s probably a couple dozen people who work there, so it’s not a realistic employment opportunity for me or anyone I know. I’m not anti-tech at all, but I wish the city hadn’t made the deal they did. Perhaps big tech could be less parasitic and contribute beneficially to society?
Is it big tech's responsibility to somehow 'contribute beneficially'? Data center construction is not a welfare project.
As long as there is no corruption involved, I do not see what is wrong with big tech choosing a project site where the cost is minimal.
If there are many poor rural cities who compete for data center deals, this would seem like an efficient free market. If public opinion swings, will this not influence politicians, and force big tech to provide better benefits in these deals?
I found the below line to get particularly "hard":
> When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ safety and data centers.1 These were very different concerns from those I hear in San Francisco—a city with no kids and no data centers
> "The EMF reader is shakier, going haywire under the crackling power lines, then settling down a few steps away"
That kind of statement really bothers me. Is it measuring the magnetic fields or RF emissions? If it's RF, what frequency? If the EMF reader is picking up radio waves, I'm not exactly concerned. Visible light would be weird. X-rays would be very concerning. Is it just picking up the 50/60Hz power line? That's all around you in your house anyway. If you just don't like power lines, say that
As a thought experiment why not just move the people who want them to those neighbourhoods and move the people who don't where the people who do live. I wonder how many would actually take that deal..
People in UK opposed train tracks in steam engine days, saying that the train engine sound scares their horses and cattle. Ofcourse data centers are far worse. But it is amusing to see how humanity continues to oppose tech and the tech buldozes anyway, like a evil monster.
How are they "far worse"? Steam trains are noisy, polluting, require tons of coal polluting, kill animals and crash fairly regularly (when built with 1800s technology).
A data center is a big grey box that sits there humming quietly, and that's it. They do require power and lots of it, but unlikely steam engines they'll happily use solar, nuclear or anything else.
I get why people wouldn't want (steam) trains in their proverbial back yard just as much as they wouldn't want datacenters. Trains may be a net benefit for a region's mobility and economy, but that doesn't undo the local disruption to people's environments. (I'm unconvinced datacenters have that impact on a region, it generates some jobs at best but most of those will be secondary/tertiary jobs. Primary jobs will be the people doing daily work in and around the site like security and maintenance, but the higher paid specialist work will be flown in or done remotely)
The new AI ones are built below minimum standards as a cash grab and they somehow manage to be as loud as jet engines. I have no idea how they manage to achieve that, but I try to avoid denying reality. I agree that an ordinary non-AI data center is no worse than an office building without the people, but that isn't what's happening right now.
55db is lower than the noise floor in the average office. They were probably just measuring the background noise of regular-ass being outside.
For perspective, the inside of your home is probably about 40. When I turn on my box fan it's about 55.
That said they can be loud when the generators are running. It's possible that when the grid can't keep up the volume goes up, but thats not meant to be a long term state.
Noise pollution is a real issue, even for data centers that is "humming quietly". Same for its energy consumption. Water cooling is another issue, given that lots of the steam a data center generates can rain down in places that wont make the water re-join the water lifecycle easily.
You're comparing steam trains in practice to datacentres in theory. To give one example: the US federal government is suspending all sorts of environmental regulations relating to pollution, just for datacentres: why would they do that if datacentres ran on clean solar or nuclear?
The data centers near me are pretty quiet. They’re set back from the road enough that they’re no louder than the background noise of traffic, wind, airplanes overhead, etc. I understand my small sample size doesn’t apply everywhere, but it does negate “all data centers are loud.” Some data centers might be loud.
That's inside the DC, right? I'd think that even with current generation GPUs the noise of the fans won't be audible outside the building but the cooling infra that is outside the building plus (backup) power generation through gas or diesel generators.
EDIT: recently I read about (I guess on HN) a new planned Amazon datacenter that was super environment-friendly. So in fact it might eventually be possible to create silent DCs but we'll see how this turns out.
Agreed in principle for today’s new ones, though with all the buying frenzy it quickly becomes hard to procure anything but the latest hardware and the economics of older generation hardware makes little sense for new data center deployments.
The linked article claims that sound can be heard "hundreds of feet from the data center". That is a very short range.
As much as I doubt that spreading of the data centers is a good thing, noise is not the weapon to wield. Unless we are talking the center of a quaint town. And possibly not even then.
I tend to like not fearing starvation every year, not fearing freezing to death every year and not having the vast majority of my kids die. Industrialization led to all that.
It's almost like all of that is true and early train companies didn't even bring enough value to the area to offset all of that?
Trains still do that today. They cut a locality in half with only certain crossing points being allowed. But at least enough people ride the train they can feel it's worthwhile.
I disagree with the “evil monster” part, but thanks for sharing that example. I’ll probably use it the opposite way in meetings .. people were deeply skeptical of railways too, yet they ended up transforming society for the better.
It's not about opposing data centers, it's about opposing them close to where you live.
There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact:
- insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away
- virtually no jobs brought to the place, besides some construction work early on
- massive drain of local resources
- massive eye sore
Like, I'm not against data centers per se, but you tell me they building one few miles from my house, I'm listing it the day I hear it and escaping as far as I can.
It's an elite project, being forced on us without having any choice. It is worsening inflation. It is increasing inequality. It is threatening careers. It has cheapened human creativity. Just look at how the elite of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and politics are coalescing to absurd lengths to fund and build these things. Why wouldn't you be suspicious...
Inflation and inequality are driven by the money printer far more than AI. The money printer is also driving AI, because there's far more supply of money than sensible investments to put it in.
Some of the reaction to data center build outs has become irrational but frankly I see it as a reflection of the arrogance of the billionaire tech elite. Voters were told:
- AI is going to take your jobs
- We need to build our data centers for this job stealing tool
- We need to build so quickly that there’s no time to do accurate assessments of what this will do to water or power supplies
Turns out people don’t like that. Who could have guessed? Anyone not living in a bubble.
"AI automating jobs", which is the narrative from tech bros to raise funding translates into "AI is going to take your job", for the average Joe. If you are a graphic designer that is now struggling to find work, why would you want a data centre in your town (or anywhere)?
Rejection (or fear) of AI translating into rejection of the physical infrastructure that supports it is perfectly reasonable.
"Everyone that disagrees with me is a bot or paid propaganda". Sure, go tell yourself that. The money is clearly on the pro-AI camp, and you'd have to be delusional to think it isn't.
The majority of people opposed AC current, cars, steam engines, rail tracks, airplanes, computers, the internet, and so on. There was always irrational fear present with new tech advances. People opposing data centers will not look any less foolish than those who opposed AC current.
I don't think the people who opposed those things look foolish even today. Most of those things, in their early days, were implemented haphazardly and with an incredible lack of regulatory oversight, and the reason they were not quite as disastrous as they could have been is that people opposed them.
And people opposing data centers today who are opposing unfettered data center creations will not look any *more* foolish than those who opposed the things you cite.
> My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
Essentially, I think there's a proximal reputational problem for AI companies, which the article calls out, but the ultimate problem is factual. It's not an education/communication/negotiation issue, because the real problem is the underlying reality. The wolf at the door being distrusted is because it's a wolf, not PR.
Well of course it's because the companies think they don't have to give a good deal. That they can get away with it.
One wonders if at this point they would have saved money not trying to fuck people over to get what they wanted. I hope so. The ideal world has companies doing things the honest way because it's honest, but I'd settle for them doing it that way because they're economically incentivized to do so.
These people, these communities, have been promised these same things before (or things adjacent to them) and have seen them not deliver, or even make their situation worse.
This is especially true of the tax income and job generation elements. The estimates provided as part of the deal are utterly divorced from reality- people know it and refuse to take part in the kayfabe that surrounds it.
But a data center wouldn't help. It would raise electric prices and doesn't really employ people.
It's kind of like one industry that is in the area - there's a company that grows huge amounts of cranberries but its mostly automated. As far as I know only three people work on this huge site. They let the cranberries grow, flood the area when they're ready. The cranberries float to the top for robots to skim the surface and harvest them. The humans just move things around for the robots.
I believe you've met a Mike Garage:
https://x.com/japan_nobunaga/status/2083940637921943803
They don't always accept payment.
https://buildermuse.com/economy/every-state-offering-data-ce...
if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle
On the other hand, my city gave the local data centers big tax breaks to come here. In the last couple years my property taxes have increased significantly along with my electricity bill. It seems obvious that I’m subsidizing the local data center. There’s probably a couple dozen people who work there, so it’s not a realistic employment opportunity for me or anyone I know. I’m not anti-tech at all, but I wish the city hadn’t made the deal they did. Perhaps big tech could be less parasitic and contribute beneficially to society?
As long as there is no corruption involved, I do not see what is wrong with big tech choosing a project site where the cost is minimal.
If there are many poor rural cities who compete for data center deals, this would seem like an efficient free market. If public opinion swings, will this not influence politicians, and force big tech to provide better benefits in these deals?
> When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ safety and data centers.1 These were very different concerns from those I hear in San Francisco—a city with no kids and no data centers
That kind of statement really bothers me. Is it measuring the magnetic fields or RF emissions? If it's RF, what frequency? If the EMF reader is picking up radio waves, I'm not exactly concerned. Visible light would be weird. X-rays would be very concerning. Is it just picking up the 50/60Hz power line? That's all around you in your house anyway. If you just don't like power lines, say that
(Remember, in a shovel rush, sell casting machines)
I suspect they wouldn't
A data center is a big grey box that sits there humming quietly, and that's it. They do require power and lots of it, but unlikely steam engines they'll happily use solar, nuclear or anything else.
It was very loud inside, but you couldn't hear it from outside unless the power failed and the generators came on.
Thats what anti-AI activists say. A decibel meter is about $20. For some reason the people in those videos never have one.
For perspective, the inside of your home is probably about 40. When I turn on my box fan it's about 55.
That said they can be loud when the generators are running. It's possible that when the grid can't keep up the volume goes up, but thats not meant to be a long term state.
EDIT: recently I read about (I guess on HN) a new planned Amazon datacenter that was super environment-friendly. So in fact it might eventually be possible to create silent DCs but we'll see how this turns out.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-n...
As much as I doubt that spreading of the data centers is a good thing, noise is not the weapon to wield. Unless we are talking the center of a quaint town. And possibly not even then.
I am interested to learn where the 96db comes from.
I see only vague claims about up to 96db inside of a server rack, but could not locate a concrete measurement or method used to determine this number.
A decibel meter is about $20 on Amazon, often cheaper. I dont know what their agenda is, but they've got one.
So you're saying the UK should never have built a railway system? It sounds like tech is right.
I tend to like not fearing starvation every year, not fearing freezing to death every year and not having the vast majority of my kids die. Industrialization led to all that.
Trains still do that today. They cut a locality in half with only certain crossing points being allowed. But at least enough people ride the train they can feel it's worthwhile.
JFC I wish people on HN would read a history book.
There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact: - insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away - virtually no jobs brought to the place, besides some construction work early on - massive drain of local resources - massive eye sore
Like, I'm not against data centers per se, but you tell me they building one few miles from my house, I'm listing it the day I hear it and escaping as far as I can.
Can you share a link or two to this? Hearing a data center from miles away sounds suspicious.
- AI is going to take your jobs
- We need to build our data centers for this job stealing tool
- We need to build so quickly that there’s no time to do accurate assessments of what this will do to water or power supplies
Turns out people don’t like that. Who could have guessed? Anyone not living in a bubble.
Rejection (or fear) of AI translating into rejection of the physical infrastructure that supports it is perfectly reasonable.
And people opposing data centers today who are opposing unfettered data center creations will not look any *more* foolish than those who opposed the things you cite.