I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
The initial phase of construction (what DC Blox initially applied for permits for) is for 69k square feet at 10 MW.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana
Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?
The entire point of cryptocurrency is to be money that is independent of any government's ability to enforce its laws. I would personally vote against polticians who enacted those kinds of regulations; and if they passed anyway I would attempt to mine and use cryptocurrency in ways that circumvented the regulations banning me from doing so.
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
What I think is nice is that the political parties opposed to data center development are actually taking concrete steps, exercising specific powers, to advance their goals.
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.
No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.
It feels like this is the first time I've seen the political system move in tune with the public mood in regards to AI and this is public anger finding expression in public policy.
Big Tech has accumulated too many grievances across too many segments of society and made too much money in the process, so let's not act surprised at a backlash. And data centers are remarkably well-suited as a focal point for people to express those accumulated grievances. I wouldn't look too hard at all the varied reasons data centers are being opposed, many of which of hyper-local, but instead at the quickness and ferocity and consistency with which they are being opposed. It reminds of the movement in the US and Canada in the 90's to oppose unfettered globalization - though this already feels larger and more widespread (and less late to the party).
My sincere theory is that this is finally the government/politics stepping in to take their cut from the AI revolution. The politicians now have a fee-based strategy where they can literally just stick a fee on any upcoming project(s). Pay up if you ever want your permits to go through and construction to get started.
While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power
You don't need a conspiracy theory. All these data centers were going up in rural/near rural areas that voted for this, but then the data centers made everyone else's electric bills go up.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
They did it because people didn't want a data center next to the zoo. There was a huge backlash against it, and the locals are very happy that they were listened to, I can promise you. No conspiracy theory necessary.
Depends on who you’re talking about. How does the cost benefit analysis work out for someone while lives within a mile of a datacenter, owns no shares in the company, and pays rate fees for their utilities and will have to pay for maintenance for the increased load capacity as well as higher spot prices? If you view America as a cohesive unit I’d agree with you, but I don’t think these people are necessarily acting irrationally if you view their personal circumstance. It’s up to the building company to sweeten the deal and provide an incentive for the locals to add it. Based on the contracts I’ve read from many of these datacenters it seems more like they’re buying the pockets of corrupt politicians and developers in areas with high political inequality while conferring very little benefit to the people who deal with the externalized cost.
I remember when building more fiber could only be good. An awful lot of it sits in the ground lost, never used because it was the wrong type or in the wrong spots, or otherwise pointless waste.
Further, electicity price hikes seems like a bad prospect when inflation is already rampant. If you want a datacenter, offer your house for the space instead.
It's always fun to watch AI zombies wrestle with the idea that sometimes the real humans have different priorities than they do. Usually people are against a lot of those power projects because those very same projects also seem to always raise rates and never deliver the promises of long-term lower rates.
The anti-datacenter movement seems so filled with propaganda (water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc) that it’s hard to believe people aren’t being influenced by some foreign state. You could build a stockyard to slaughter pipeline and get far less pushback while using way more water and having an actual negative impact to all of the surrounding area through the entirety of your operations.
Hats off to whoever is stoking this. It’s witchcraft trials levels of hysteria.
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
The issues you listed seem intractable in the U.S., and the current NIMBYism towards data centers seems likely to make NIMBYism towards housing even worse - a number of the same arguments that were used against housing are now being used against DCs, but we’re seeing a whole new level of NIMBY tactics being tried out - I expect we will see similar city-wide/county-wide bans on multi-family housing, mass transit, mixed zoning, etc - or use of eminent domain to block housing projects, etc. if this kind of NIMBYism becomes accepted or even celebrated against DCs.
Or for your suggestion to “fix healthcare” - how and by whom? The solutions that those on the left push are anathema to the GOP, etc.
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.
It’s not necessarily “super high” latency to connect to data centers at a distance. Whether or not it matters depends on the application, and for most consumer applications it isn’t a huge issue. For AI data centers it doesn’t really matter.
The photo at the very top of the article shows an incredibly low density area. If someone was expecting to see urban density, or even single story main street density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to think it was just electricity. It could be just electricity, but when they try to divert hundreds of millions of gallons out of water scarce resources like the colorado river[1] in dry, HOT areas where water usage rises -- you can begin to understand why people are irritated. Even if you get promises of using closed systems, corporations are liars.
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
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.
Yeah, those might be some of the other factors. My point is just that actual water use does not explain datacenter pushback well, despite being a predominant argument against them.
of course there are other factors at play here. has anyone tried to hide their motives?
look, i use llms for some work and for some hobby projects, but lets not pretend like the companies behind the llm bubble would ever fight fair. that would be naive to an extreme.
Then they should be even easier to shut down if they're viewed as a wasteful use of water! I think the fact that they are not shut down is evidence that people do not in fact view them as such, or at least not as much people view data centers as a waste of water.
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.
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.
I put the blame on AI and data centers. The Powers That Be want the AI surveillance state. Funny how they don't care about the Climate Change agenda anymore, now that they have AI.
Companies will always adopt the stances of the ruling party, its part of the core concept of limited liability ownership. Its one of the primary reasons people hate actual capitalism (by which i mean the thing that actually exists and is called capitalism).
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.
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
Having a closed coolant loop and using evaporative cooling which expends water aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for a datacenter to manage heat rejection by blowing air over a radiator like a car does, but it's much easier and cheaper to cool by evaporating water.
This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.
This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.
A sizable percentage of datacenters use open loop water spray towers, but the alternative, forced air exchange (ie add more giant fans) uses more electricity. It’s fairly complex to quantify which is “better” or “worse” but there exist data centers that evaporate a ton of water and send it elsewhere. (for what it’s worth I agree most of the anti datacenter hype is overblown and driven by specific poorly designed gas turbine powered installations).
...which then comes down again as rain, and in those areas where it's dry enough that evaporative cooling works, the increased humidity might actually be a good thing.
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?
What stood out to me was this: "By a 27-5 vote". That number seemed really high, so I looked it up - this isn't a city or a county or some kind of private tax distict - its was the nation's first city-county government.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
I think they are claiming it was the first merger of a multiple cities and a county. Rather than something that was originally created a merged county/city (like San Francisco) or a merger where the city/county boundaries were already identical (like Philadelphia and Philadelphia County)
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
Unfortunately - the widespread propaganda seen around both nuclear power plants and datacenters is ultimately going to cost America everything - the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
>the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
Not once instance of these datacenters has proven to be beneficial for the communities and economies they're located in.
Further, electicity price hikes seems like a bad prospect when inflation is already rampant. If you want a datacenter, offer your house for the space instead.
Hats off to whoever is stoking this. It’s witchcraft trials levels of hysteria.
Or for your suggestion to “fix healthcare” - how and by whom? The solutions that those on the left push are anathema to the GOP, etc.
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.
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
The photo at the very top of the article shows an incredibly low density area. If someone was expecting to see urban density, or even single story main street density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
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...
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
[1] - https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/data-center-develop...
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.
Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.
Try to build as many new golf courses as there are new data centers going up and you might get a similar reaction...
look, i use llms for some work and for some hobby projects, but lets not pretend like the companies behind the llm bubble would ever fight fair. that would be naive to an extreme.
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.
However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.
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
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...)
This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.
This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.
[1] https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-to-resume-construction-on-wa...
*increasingly nonspecific. See [1] for example
[1] https://floodlightnews.org/ai-data-centers-texas-pollution-l...
Liquid cooling pulls heat away from the chips. Evaporative cooling takes it out of the building.
There are alternatives, but evaporative cooling is very energy efficient.
Aren’t there real instances of metas data centers causing havoc for nearby residents? Light/boise pollution, contaminated water are real things
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?
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
https://www.nashville.gov/departments/council
San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821