Why aren’t the dot centers bribing the locals with infrastructure? DC needs a GW of capacity? Build 3 GV, put 2 into the grid at low cost, build out transmission?
It used to be standard that companies would build infrastructure along with their plants. Cities all across the US Midwest were built this way.
> Why aren’t the dot centers bribing the locals with infrastructure?
It might be that they can't. (Well, not without spending even more money or time.)
They're looking for power which:
1. Fits on-site, rather than needing more space or being far away and dependent on the grid.
2. Can be ramped up on-demand, to keep their stuff running if there's a blackout.
3. Prioritizes their facility with "first dibs" when there are brownouts or other issues.
4. Can be built quickly so that they can finish the facility and start selling/renting.
These requirements are tend to conflict with the goals of making cheap power for sale: An offshore wind-farm might mollify local ratepayers, but it doesn't do anything for their facility reaching "ready".
If you offer to add a bunch of offshore wind turbines or build a new nuclear plant, what happens? It's basically "address NIMBY opposition by doing something that incurs NIMBY opposition".
The real problem is that politics has gotten so broken that people have lost the connection between building things and having them. You'll have the same people opposing new generating capacity while complaining about high electric bills.
So, cut the red tape which makes building a new nuclear power plant take 15 years, standardise on a few type-approved installations, get enough battery storage built to replaced most peaker plants. Do it already, stop this endless discussion which has led nowhere for the last 30-40 years.
> Not building out data centers would mean your $200 spend would be $500 no? Just supply/demand wise
Is there actually any evidence we're short on inference compute, let alone by a factor of 2.5? To me it always seemed the data centers were about accommodating some extreme predictions on future demand, scaling up training and trying to outdo one another in capturing the limited hardware.
I suspect they just got a wake-up call. In one night they lost a friendly congress by a LARGE margin, many local elections including Texas AG and Gov just walked out of their lives. Voters all over the country made their feelings on this issue clear enough that it would be difficult to pin this response on a party rather than the people as a whole.
All of this was preceded by the first economic shocks of the bubble bursting, and now it's truly underway. By this time next week it's entirely possible there will be fewer SV "Leaders" in a position to do more than wonder when exactly it all went so wrong.
I think it's a natural reaction to the "our AI systems are really dangerous and might kill you all and will definitely take your jobs" messages that have been coming out of the AI labs for the past few years.
They've dialed them back a bit now, but way too late. That message has sunk in.
Campaigning to prevent data centers from being built is the most actionable thing a US citizen can do, because it's a local issue (and hence something they can influence), plus they can use arguments about noise and power prices and water pollution to help make the case.
(I think most of those arguments don't stand up to scrutiny - as light industry goes data centers are pretty minor, would you prefer a concrete plant in your back yard? But I don't think the arguments are the point for a lot of people. It's about having a way to oppose AI generally.)
> think it's a natural reaction to the "our AI systems are really dangerous and might kill you all and will definitely take your jobs" messages that have been coming out of the AI labs for the past few years.
It's a natural reaction to sound, water, soil an earth pollution.
I don't see why I shouldn't be against them. It doesn't benefit me in any way, it just increases my electricity costs. Nor am I sure there is even a market for the majority of proposed data center builds, if this exponential growth/need for computing power doesn't hold we will be flushing money down the toilet, and largely on the public's dime since most of it is funded by loans and debt. Even if LLMs achieve all that is promised and more, that just means more people out of work sooner and the already powerful and wealthy gain more power and wealth than anybody else.
In some alternate universe, the AI companies could have used some of their billions to subsidize consumer accounts, or something, rather than just let 'supply and demand' raise the rates for all the people that they needed to not vote against them. why should anyone not directly benefitting from AI be charged more for their monthly keeping the lights on bill? The short-sightedness of the powerful never ceases to amaze me.
> In some alternate universe, the AI companies could have used some of their billions to subsidize consumer accounts, or something,
The "or something" should have been building out power generation and feeding back a fraction of that into the grid. At least then the electricity costs can drop for the locals.
If they proposed a data centre that has it's own power generation, and fed 20% of the electricity back into the grid, there'd be less opposition.
Look, I use Claude every day. It's great for my work, and it genuinely makes me more productive, and I like it.
That said, I live out in the boonies (as far east from the SF bay area as you can go before there is just nothing but the forests of the Sierras). They are talking about building a data center in Ione, a small town out here in the middle of nowhere (not quite as remote as where I am). Now, I cannot fathom why that would be a good place. There's no water, there's no infrastructure, we're not near any internet backbone. Perhaps land is cheap out here, but electricity is served by PG&E, so I don't imagine it's particularly cheap. I, and everyone I know living out here, are vehemently against building data centers out here. It just makes no sense to put them out here, especially with the wildfire risks. There's really no propaganda needed to make people hate them.
I have no doubt there's foreign bot armies amplifying these things, but foreign bot armies understand they're most effective when the amplify real sentiments.
And the anti-data center stuff is a very, very real sentiment.
It's both. It's not either or. It's absolutely both.
There are good reasons for people to be pissed off about data centers in the U.S.
China is absolutely funneling money to push anti-datacenter sentiment, and many of the people involved/receiving that money are not aware of where that money came from.
We are at the crux of a national security spiral in AI development that is naturally unpopular at home.
You know it's entirely possible for China to be pushing this while dropping their own fortune into research, and for everyone to lose their investments.
Don't get me wrong, it's no that the tech is useless, especially for militaries and surveillance states, but it's not the economic miracle or 'new industrial revolution' so many have gotten away with promoting. I think many here will be shocked at just how quickly a fad can die when the money implodes.
Who are the people receiving money from China to be opposed to the wasteful data center buildout, and how can I get some? I'm still waiting for my check from Russia / Iran / Qatar for being opposed to Israel's genocide campaign.
>what is the purity spiral and why is it left wing?
People trying to 1-up each other leading to the beliefs of a group being more polarized[1]. The naming doesn't imply it's a partisan phenomenon, any more than "right wing politician" implies politicians are a right wing phenomenon
Purely anecdotal from my point of view. The folks I see being very anti-AI are also the more left-wing folks in my bubble, who I know have gone down some of the purity spirals we've had before.
I don't know many right-wing folks. Most of the ones I do know are dealing with different issues and don't really give a toss about AI one way or the other.
There is probably a lot of overlapping factors, for example I would think that the general dislike of genAI in the art/creative scene (which skews left) would play a role.
However, I was living in the UK when the miners lost their livelihoods. Entire communities left to fend for themselves on diminishing benefits with no support.
I see some hypocrisy in our (knowledge worker) industry. The same sort of folks who were supporting Thatcherism and cheerfully calling themselves Yuppies, completely rejecting any attempt to unionise or join any collective bargaining efforts, are the same sort of folks (though not necessarily the same individuals) who are now complaining that they'll be left without a livelihood by AI.
Best time to unionise was 30 years ago. Second best time is now. But this is still somewhat of a radical position for a HN reader to hold.
I sometimes compare the user sentiments here and what I see and hear from my peers in the real world, and boy some people in tech are detached from day to day realities of life for the majority. Parent’s a good example.
The software industry is definitely the forerunner of the changes we'll see. It's being transformed completely, way more so than other professions. So to some extent it's not surprising that we (HN) have a different viewpoint than folks in other industries.
Yeah it's not like all these ai-tech oligarchs enabled trump to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each and he proceeded to disenfranchise voters, kidnap minorities, and make a mockery of environmental protections. "left wing purity spiral stuff" people are watching community members without criminal records languish in work camps.
i work in AI and i think we should hit the brakes: get a better oversight mechanism in place, help local municipalities get more in exchange for building them (no more tax incentives, NDAs, high emissions power sources), those are good places to start.
rushing ahead with the 'it might destroy us but we've gotta beat China!' is silly bullshit.
And the debt financing needs to stop.
There's a sensible path forward that doesn't involve a full stop, nor maintains the previous trajectory.
My electricity bill is 50% higher than this same month 1 year ago. My friends and neighbors in my city have said that they also have greatly increased electricity bills. Whether or not that increase is due to a specific data center, it's extremely easy to blame it on the increased electricity usage of data centers, no foreign propaganda required.
My electricity cost per kWh has just about doubled over the last 3 years, but afaik, it's mostly related to legislated changes to the energy mix and increases in fuel costs.
Fuel costs are up for lots of reasons, more demand for electricity could certainly be one of them... Inflation is certainly another component.
If the problem is demand outstripping supply then the obvious thing to insist on is that if they want to build, they should add more supply than they're consuming, so that they're fronting the money to make your electric bills go down.
Whereas instead we keep seeing proposals to ban them outright, which is the thing you'd expect to be pushed by someone with a different interest than domestic electric bills.
Right, so why is the proposal to prohibit "data centers" instead of the thing you're objecting to? Make them add more in non-fossil fuel generation than they're consuming.
We’re going to pretend that these are the same concerns as an HOA squabble about wrong roofs? I like AI as a useful tool worth investing in but let’s not be dismissive about what people are actually mad about, because this dismissive attitude is exactly why SV finds itself where it is.
How many people have actually experienced a super loud data center, or a data center that's polluting their water supply, or polluting their air? To me the opposition seems to be 99% from people who are just talking about this because it's part of the zeitgeist right now.
Even the story you linked about the water supply, it was wastewater not drinking water. I'm not saying that it's good or even okay for wastewater to have bacteria in it. But if people en masse are against data centers because they "could pollute the entire town’s water supply," based on a singular case of one data center's wastewater having some bacteria, that gives me pause. This seems more like a trendy issue than a practical one for most people.
> I'm convinced the anti data center movement is foreign propaganda
Exactly! No rational person could oppose supergeniuses like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, etc., so if people do, the logical conclusion is that they've been manipulated by a psyop.
Why aren’t the dot centers bribing the locals with infrastructure? DC needs a GW of capacity? Build 3 GV, put 2 into the grid at low cost, build out transmission?
It used to be standard that companies would build infrastructure along with their plants. Cities all across the US Midwest were built this way.
> Why aren’t the dot centers bribing the locals with infrastructure?
It might be that they can't. (Well, not without spending even more money or time.)
They're looking for power which:
1. Fits on-site, rather than needing more space or being far away and dependent on the grid.
2. Can be ramped up on-demand, to keep their stuff running if there's a blackout.
3. Prioritizes their facility with "first dibs" when there are brownouts or other issues.
4. Can be built quickly so that they can finish the facility and start selling/renting.
These requirements are tend to conflict with the goals of making cheap power for sale: An offshore wind-farm might mollify local ratepayers, but it doesn't do anything for their facility reaching "ready".
If you offer to add a bunch of offshore wind turbines or build a new nuclear plant, what happens? It's basically "address NIMBY opposition by doing something that incurs NIMBY opposition".
The real problem is that politics has gotten so broken that people have lost the connection between building things and having them. You'll have the same people opposing new generating capacity while complaining about high electric bills.
Vogtle 3/4 cost 30B and took 15 years for 2GW. Gas turbines pollute and need gas infrastructure. Solar needs better batteries.
So, cut the red tape which makes building a new nuclear power plant take 15 years, standardise on a few type-approved installations, get enough battery storage built to replaced most peaker plants. Do it already, stop this endless discussion which has led nowhere for the last 30-40 years.
https://archive.ph/roI0Y
I’m pro-AI. I use it all the time. I max out my $200 claude subscription and own a strix halo.
The data center buildout makes no sense.
I don’t want to work for a Trump lapdog, so MAGA++ recruiters can go pound sand.
I don’t think SV leadership realizes how f—-ked they are.
Not building out data centers would mean your $200 spend would be $500 no? Just supply/demand wise
Only in the MAGA world are we somehow given a choice between NDA-laden, Coal powered loud turbine data center projects or no data centers at all.
Feels like there’s always been an easy middle ground no? I agree nothing in the MAGA world has forced tech to pursue it, but it’s always been there.
> Not building out data centers would mean your $200 spend would be $500 no? Just supply/demand wise
Is there actually any evidence we're short on inference compute, let alone by a factor of 2.5? To me it always seemed the data centers were about accommodating some extreme predictions on future demand, scaling up training and trying to outdo one another in capturing the limited hardware.
Microsoft Amazon Google Apple to be clear.
Apples building AI datacenters?
I suspect they just got a wake-up call. In one night they lost a friendly congress by a LARGE margin, many local elections including Texas AG and Gov just walked out of their lives. Voters all over the country made their feelings on this issue clear enough that it would be difficult to pin this response on a party rather than the people as a whole.
All of this was preceded by the first economic shocks of the bubble bursting, and now it's truly underway. By this time next week it's entirely possible there will be fewer SV "Leaders" in a position to do more than wonder when exactly it all went so wrong.
Hint: It was the beginning.
I'm convinced the anti data center movement is foreign propaganda
I think it's a natural reaction to the "our AI systems are really dangerous and might kill you all and will definitely take your jobs" messages that have been coming out of the AI labs for the past few years.
They've dialed them back a bit now, but way too late. That message has sunk in.
Campaigning to prevent data centers from being built is the most actionable thing a US citizen can do, because it's a local issue (and hence something they can influence), plus they can use arguments about noise and power prices and water pollution to help make the case.
(I think most of those arguments don't stand up to scrutiny - as light industry goes data centers are pretty minor, would you prefer a concrete plant in your back yard? But I don't think the arguments are the point for a lot of people. It's about having a way to oppose AI generally.)
> think it's a natural reaction to the "our AI systems are really dangerous and might kill you all and will definitely take your jobs" messages that have been coming out of the AI labs for the past few years.
It's a natural reaction to sound, water, soil an earth pollution.
I don't see why I shouldn't be against them. It doesn't benefit me in any way, it just increases my electricity costs. Nor am I sure there is even a market for the majority of proposed data center builds, if this exponential growth/need for computing power doesn't hold we will be flushing money down the toilet, and largely on the public's dime since most of it is funded by loans and debt. Even if LLMs achieve all that is promised and more, that just means more people out of work sooner and the already powerful and wealthy gain more power and wealth than anybody else.
In some alternate universe, the AI companies could have used some of their billions to subsidize consumer accounts, or something, rather than just let 'supply and demand' raise the rates for all the people that they needed to not vote against them. why should anyone not directly benefitting from AI be charged more for their monthly keeping the lights on bill? The short-sightedness of the powerful never ceases to amaze me.
> In some alternate universe, the AI companies could have used some of their billions to subsidize consumer accounts, or something,
The "or something" should have been building out power generation and feeding back a fraction of that into the grid. At least then the electricity costs can drop for the locals.
If they proposed a data centre that has it's own power generation, and fed 20% of the electricity back into the grid, there'd be less opposition.
Look, I use Claude every day. It's great for my work, and it genuinely makes me more productive, and I like it.
That said, I live out in the boonies (as far east from the SF bay area as you can go before there is just nothing but the forests of the Sierras). They are talking about building a data center in Ione, a small town out here in the middle of nowhere (not quite as remote as where I am). Now, I cannot fathom why that would be a good place. There's no water, there's no infrastructure, we're not near any internet backbone. Perhaps land is cheap out here, but electricity is served by PG&E, so I don't imagine it's particularly cheap. I, and everyone I know living out here, are vehemently against building data centers out here. It just makes no sense to put them out here, especially with the wildfire risks. There's really no propaganda needed to make people hate them.
I have no doubt there's foreign bot armies amplifying these things, but foreign bot armies understand they're most effective when the amplify real sentiments.
And the anti-data center stuff is a very, very real sentiment.
> foreign bot armies understand they're most effective when the amplify real sentiments.
"Propaganda is just helping you get in touch with your true feelings."
I know actual people who are deeply opposed to AI (well, the current AI tech anyway), for what seem to them to be good moral reasons.
I find the attitude a bit weird and very left-wing purity-spiral stuff, but it is a real attitude that real people have.
It's both. It's not either or. It's absolutely both.
There are good reasons for people to be pissed off about data centers in the U.S.
China is absolutely funneling money to push anti-datacenter sentiment, and many of the people involved/receiving that money are not aware of where that money came from.
We are at the crux of a national security spiral in AI development that is naturally unpopular at home.
You know it's entirely possible for China to be pushing this while dropping their own fortune into research, and for everyone to lose their investments.
Don't get me wrong, it's no that the tech is useless, especially for militaries and surveillance states, but it's not the economic miracle or 'new industrial revolution' so many have gotten away with promoting. I think many here will be shocked at just how quickly a fad can die when the money implodes.
Who are the people receiving money from China to be opposed to the wasteful data center buildout, and how can I get some? I'm still waiting for my check from Russia / Iran / Qatar for being opposed to Israel's genocide campaign.
what is the purity spiral and why is it left wing?
it seems like a group of issues that the general public might be concerned about
>what is the purity spiral and why is it left wing?
People trying to 1-up each other leading to the beliefs of a group being more polarized[1]. The naming doesn't imply it's a partisan phenomenon, any more than "right wing politician" implies politicians are a right wing phenomenon
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
i know what a purity spiral is. i was asking what this one is about and why the comment implied it is partisan
Purely anecdotal from my point of view. The folks I see being very anti-AI are also the more left-wing folks in my bubble, who I know have gone down some of the purity spirals we've had before.
I don't know many right-wing folks. Most of the ones I do know are dealing with different issues and don't really give a toss about AI one way or the other.
The datacenter opposition is definitely partisan, even if you can find some overlap in supporters
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260905_USC...
Independents are only about 7pts off there from Dems,
Are we just going to ignore the 30+% difference between democrats and republicans?
I would think that Elon Musk being Trump's lapdog while owning so much AI compute that he rents it out might have something to do with it.
There is probably a lot of overlapping factors, for example I would think that the general dislike of genAI in the art/creative scene (which skews left) would play a role.
> for what seem to them to be good moral reasons
Like the desire to have a livelihood?
I get this.
However, I was living in the UK when the miners lost their livelihoods. Entire communities left to fend for themselves on diminishing benefits with no support.
I see some hypocrisy in our (knowledge worker) industry. The same sort of folks who were supporting Thatcherism and cheerfully calling themselves Yuppies, completely rejecting any attempt to unionise or join any collective bargaining efforts, are the same sort of folks (though not necessarily the same individuals) who are now complaining that they'll be left without a livelihood by AI.
Best time to unionise was 30 years ago. Second best time is now. But this is still somewhat of a radical position for a HN reader to hold.
And not wanting all knowledge and skills strip-mined and then sold back to us.
I sometimes compare the user sentiments here and what I see and hear from my peers in the real world, and boy some people in tech are detached from day to day realities of life for the majority. Parent’s a good example.
The software industry is definitely the forerunner of the changes we'll see. It's being transformed completely, way more so than other professions. So to some extent it's not surprising that we (HN) have a different viewpoint than folks in other industries.
Yeah it's not like all these ai-tech oligarchs enabled trump to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each and he proceeded to disenfranchise voters, kidnap minorities, and make a mockery of environmental protections. "left wing purity spiral stuff" people are watching community members without criminal records languish in work camps.
Agree completely, but what does this have to do with data centers?
i work in AI and i think we should hit the brakes: get a better oversight mechanism in place, help local municipalities get more in exchange for building them (no more tax incentives, NDAs, high emissions power sources), those are good places to start.
rushing ahead with the 'it might destroy us but we've gotta beat China!' is silly bullshit.
And the debt financing needs to stop.
There's a sensible path forward that doesn't involve a full stop, nor maintains the previous trajectory.
My electricity bill is 50% higher than this same month 1 year ago. My friends and neighbors in my city have said that they also have greatly increased electricity bills. Whether or not that increase is due to a specific data center, it's extremely easy to blame it on the increased electricity usage of data centers, no foreign propaganda required.
My electricity cost per kWh has just about doubled over the last 3 years, but afaik, it's mostly related to legislated changes to the energy mix and increases in fuel costs.
Fuel costs are up for lots of reasons, more demand for electricity could certainly be one of them... Inflation is certainly another component.
If the problem is demand outstripping supply then the obvious thing to insist on is that if they want to build, they should add more supply than they're consuming, so that they're fronting the money to make your electric bills go down.
Whereas instead we keep seeing proposals to ban them outright, which is the thing you'd expect to be pushed by someone with a different interest than domestic electric bills.
> they should add more supply than they're consuming
In some places they're scavaging old jet engines and using them to generate electricity for data centers. Lots of noise, not very efficient - very bad idea. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/climate/jet-engines-ai-da...
Right, so why is the proposal to prohibit "data centers" instead of the thing you're objecting to? Make them add more in non-fossil fuel generation than they're consuming.
My neighbors take issue with people getting the wrong roof on their house. Not surprised people being against a data center nearby.
What do those have to do with each other?
People are very NIMBY about these things.
Because they’re loud?
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuq/comments/1t7293k/t...
Or could pollute the entire town’s water supply?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/us-datacente...
Or air?
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
We’re going to pretend that these are the same concerns as an HOA squabble about wrong roofs? I like AI as a useful tool worth investing in but let’s not be dismissive about what people are actually mad about, because this dismissive attitude is exactly why SV finds itself where it is.
I think we are on the same side. I’m saying people get angry about little things, no wonder they would get angry about even more serious issues.
How many people have actually experienced a super loud data center, or a data center that's polluting their water supply, or polluting their air? To me the opposition seems to be 99% from people who are just talking about this because it's part of the zeitgeist right now.
Even the story you linked about the water supply, it was wastewater not drinking water. I'm not saying that it's good or even okay for wastewater to have bacteria in it. But if people en masse are against data centers because they "could pollute the entire town’s water supply," based on a singular case of one data center's wastewater having some bacteria, that gives me pause. This seems more like a trendy issue than a practical one for most people.
Why...? Or is this just a sarcastic way of saying you disagree with the movement?
> I'm convinced the anti data center movement is foreign propaganda
Exactly! No rational person could oppose supergeniuses like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, etc., so if people do, the logical conclusion is that they've been manipulated by a psyop.
Science is my superpower!
Believe me brother, from the other side of the ocean I couldn't care less if you drowned in your own shit. I just don't want it on my land.
Many real people show up at city council meetings all the time to speak out against data centers.
And contrary to a lot of recent right-wing conspiracy theories, there isn't much of a market for paying people to show up to protests.
There's a small market but only for right-wing conspiracy protests, which is where those people got the idea from
it is woke mind virus propagated via 5g towers and vaccines