US voters overwhelmingly oppose building AI data centers, with support collapsing across all demographics. A swift and massive shift in public opinion.
Agreed, people think that a building that large and with that much money going into it is going to need a lot of local employees. When they find out that it just needs a janitorial staff and tons of electricity and water they start to wonder why anyone would want one of these around… especially if it isn’t paying taxes.
Its also extracting resources, water and power and land, and sending the value to some multinational who isn’t going to return it to the local economy.
honestly, here it kinda is. mistral invested 1.2B€ in a local server hosting company for them to build a dc on the location of the paper mill that shut down a few years ago. paper mills already pull huge amounts of power and put out tons of heat, so the site is already plugged in and connected to the district heating grid. on a local level this is actually good because it means our heating bills go down.
yeah any employment boosts are short lived, but at least there won’t be additional impact here. it’s a town with a giant steel mill in it, which means hydro power out the wazoo (we have four dams just in the city), they’re going to use river water for cooling directly rather than drinking water as they’re on the waterfront, the site is full of chemicals from the paper production anyway so it’s not like it could be used for anything else, and the company isn’t one of the big bads, it’s a local actor who have built all their previous dc’s using stuff like lumber and recycled metals.
honestly it could be so much worse. i used to live where facebook spun up their first dc outside the us, and they were so used to that flimsy electrical grid they tested their 50MW backup diesel plant once a month. after running for a year without even so much as a frequency drift they stopped doing that but the town did smell faintly of diesel for that first period.
Edit: i’m hoping it’ll be at least partly colo so they don’t completely collapse in a few years.
I think a bunch of people may have naively assumed it was a new local industry like a power station or factory.
Agreed, people think that a building that large and with that much money going into it is going to need a lot of local employees. When they find out that it just needs a janitorial staff and tons of electricity and water they start to wonder why anyone would want one of these around… especially if it isn’t paying taxes.
Its also extracting resources, water and power and land, and sending the value to some multinational who isn’t going to return it to the local economy.
honestly, here it kinda is. mistral invested 1.2B€ in a local server hosting company for them to build a dc on the location of the paper mill that shut down a few years ago. paper mills already pull huge amounts of power and put out tons of heat, so the site is already plugged in and connected to the district heating grid. on a local level this is actually good because it means our heating bills go down.
Just ignore the noise and pollution. (Yes paper mills are bad, but big datacenters are worse, and without the bonus of employment.)
yeah any employment boosts are short lived, but at least there won’t be additional impact here. it’s a town with a giant steel mill in it, which means hydro power out the wazoo (we have four dams just in the city), they’re going to use river water for cooling directly rather than drinking water as they’re on the waterfront, the site is full of chemicals from the paper production anyway so it’s not like it could be used for anything else, and the company isn’t one of the big bads, it’s a local actor who have built all their previous dc’s using stuff like lumber and recycled metals.
honestly it could be so much worse. i used to live where facebook spun up their first dc outside the us, and they were so used to that flimsy electrical grid they tested their 50MW backup diesel plant once a month. after running for a year without even so much as a frequency drift they stopped doing that but the town did smell faintly of diesel for that first period.
Edit: i’m hoping it’ll be at least partly colo so they don’t completely collapse in a few years.