As US Communities Start Fighting Back, Many Datacenters are Blocked (apnews.com)
- Reference: 0180515919
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/05/0445216/as-us-communities-start-fighting-back-many-datacenters-are-blocked
- Source link: https://apnews.com/article/data-centers-artificial-intelligence-nimby-tech-21fa7b957664d5dca6788e35ab43b88e
> Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other's battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources... [A]s more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests...
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> A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more. Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he'd worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people's yards. "It's becoming a huge problem," Cvengros said. Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development. Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking...
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> For some people angry over [2]steep increases in electric bills , their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/data-centers-artificial-intelligence-nimby-tech-21fa7b957664d5dca6788e35ab43b88e
[2] https://apnews.com/article/2026-election-utility-bills-ai-data-centers-13703f61d1397612fd067e69b9093116
But the bailout? (Score:2, Funny)
If we don't let them put new datacenters all over the place who will then get our bailout tax dollars??
News flash (Score:2)
Terrible neighbors unwelcome in neighborhood! Film at 11.
The noise is the biggest issue for me (Score:5, Interesting)
I live a few miles from several of these, and I have very good hearing. Imagine hearing a propeller plane like a Cessna far out in the distance. I hear it, but my wife can't. It's gets drowned out, but in the mornings when its quiet it annoys the heck out of me. Our local fb community group has a dozen or so posts about people who hear it too.
Re: (Score:3)
If all you can do is hear it you're lucky. A lot of people get headaches from the noise. It's kind of a low level drone that really messes some people up
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I can hear fluorescent light bulbs. Working in an office was nearly impossible without headphones to drown it out. Like having tinitus and trying to sleep.
The day the office moved to LED was life changing. I could hear my own thoughts again.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly which equipment is the noise coming from? I've worked in chemical plants for decades, with hundreds of pumps running 24/7, multiple large cooling towers, dozens of blowers larger than anything you'd find in a data center, and there was no noise problem. I ride my bike past the last one I worked at all the time; it's about a mile from the highway and you can't hear anything, although you can smell it sometimes.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it is related to the frequency of the data centers' equipment? I don't know myself.
Re: (Score:2)
No idea, just know its from the data centers, or a data center. One user in our group said it was from a failing cooler, but the noise has persisted even after they said its been fixed (again according to this person on the fb feed, they said after contacting the center it took almost 3 weeks to get it addressed).
Will NIMBY save us from Big Tech? (Score:3)
In the next issue of Dystopian Adventure Stories...
Re:Will NIMBY save us from Big Tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty justified NIMBY here, the companies don't want to give the local communities anything but problems, and it's not something they really *demand* like traditional NIMBY concerns around power plants, landfills, etc.
Re: (Score:3)
Well maybe. But government processes are slow, while the speed of the AI bubble inflating is fast. I suspect that the bubble bursting, will save us from Big Tech before the municipal processes have even finished playing out.
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Why don't they build these in the heart of Alaska, or Northern Canada, where there are no people living? Run power lines to those places, and have major datacenters lining up the region. That will allow for ambient cooling to back up whatever cooling they already have to do, and they can do it w/o affecting the power bills of people in cities. I'd rather have a nuclear plant in my neighborhood: at least it gives power, rather than using it and raising my utility bills
Re: Will NIMBY save us from Big Tech? (Score:2)
Partly, and primarily, latency. For a lot of modern SaaS applications, you're already pretty close to the so-called Doherty threshold ( 400 ms response time) just from the latency of the application itself on both ends (on the servers, plus communication between servers, and in the user's browser). Add a significant amount of latency from the round-trip to Alaska or northern Ontario and back for a user someplace like Seattle or Florida, and you're risking users perceiving your dating app or whatever as sl
And once the bubble pops... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of these data centers will be sitting, unused as well.
With the depreciation of hardware, cost of energy, use of water and land, and no profitability in sight, I am totally missing how these datacenters get approved in the first place. And the next revisions of Nvidia gpus may even require the racking setup to be changed, so these datacenters may be considered dated before they're even built. Everything that I have read points to them doing nothing but losing money in operation. I am happy to be enlightened if someone can explain to me how these datacenters would ever be profitable.
Re: And once the bubble pops... (Score:5, Insightful)
Itâ(TM)s tulips all the way down. And in the height of tulip fever, nobody even asked what the blossoms would look like.
I don't think the bubble will pop (Score:3)
I mean I do think that we the taxpayer are going to get stuck paying for it when there's a shake out and all those bank loans turn out bad but the actual infrastructure is going to continue to be used by billionaires and trillionaires.
The ability to replace white color workers and to eliminate paying wages is what AI is all about. Paying wages is the problem AI solves.
That is worth a hell of a lot of money and that's not going to go away.
I think the confusion is everyone assumes AI is a consumer
Re: (Score:2)
> The ability to replace white color workers and to eliminate paying wages is what AI is all about.
Without arguing that point - here's the counter argument. Regardless of what goal is in mind for these AI datacenters, the stuff in them is being rapidly obsoleted. This is kinda like the early days of bitcoin mining where people were using ever more GPUs and later FPGAs until someone designed ASIC miners that were an order of magnitude more power efficient. Even assuming the market for "AI" keeps growing (which it will not; basically every study that's not sponsored by nVidia shows that AI adds nothing to
Re:And once the bubble pops... (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine several hundred acres of junk building sitting fallow not paying taxes, near impossible to sell because it's so specialized.
Even the ones that get approved should have to put the money for upgrading utilities into escrow BEFORE they receive approval. They can have the money back if the project falls through and the utility work hasn't started, but if it has started even if the wholly owned subsidiary goes bankrupt (or the project fails) the citizens won't be stuck paying for a new power plant or other utilities.
Personally speaking most of these are going to become anchors tied to the necks of communities that approve their existence. Even if they succeed as data centers, speaking as someone who has to visit extremely large centers, most of the jobs are NOT high-paying. Heck, many of the jobs are third party contractors like maintenance (cleaning, lawn, et al.) or security. A lot of the high-paying jobs are people who will not live nearby, with remote hands being the most common technical job. On average the highest paid people that will be on-site will only be there when something like lifecycle (hardware replacement) happens.
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> They can have the money back if the project falls through and the utility work hasn't started
Strongly disagree. They can only have the money back if no shovel has been turned, literally or metaphorically. By the time construction has started there's already been disruption to the community. All or nothing, fuck those fucking fucks.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
> I am totally missing how these datacenters get approved in the first place.
Trump, republicans, kickbacks, bribes. Any questions, take a look at how republicans and FirstEnergy screwed Ohio utility payers:
[1]They Spent Millions to Protect Polluters. Then They Got Busted by the FBI. [motherjones.com]
GOP SOP - Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. LOL! They even hired mob thugs to intimidate the petition signature collectors that were trying to stop the thievery in Ohio. I have no doubt they will do the same for the petition pushers trying to stop the data centers. Voting has consequenc
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/07/they-spent-millions-to-protect-polluters-then-they-got-busted-by-the-fbi/
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
America put a thug in the presidency. He acts like thug; he never goes after anyone who can defend themselves; he only does it if he is assured of some monetary or political win; and he makes sure there are always a collection of sycophantic scapegoats handy in case whatever scam he's pulling goes south and doesn't want to be seen holding the bag. He's okay with holding bag as a last resort as long as he isn't seen to be holding the bag. That frequently involves him paying off whomever he screwed over. And
âoeItâ(TM)s becoming a huge problemâ (Score:4, Insightful)
This statement, together with labeling residentsâ(TM) assertion of local preference as âoe community, political and regulatory disruptions,â really signals the executive classâ(TM)s complete disconnection from and apathy toward the real people living as citizens in the world. They seem to hold the assumption that their being at the forefront if aome kind of business movement is assurance they are good people doing good things, and that insensitivity to the needs of actual other people is an asset.
Itâ(TM)s a tremendous sign of hope that community disruptions are actuall a problem. for them.
Re:âoeItâ(TM)s becoming a huge problem&# (Score:2)
Reminds me of the start of The Running Man... "Food riot in progress. Approximately 1500 civilians. Moving in".
Strain on Resources (Score:5, Informative)
Who isn't surprised that Tucson, AZ and Chandler, AZ both voted down data centers recently? It is stupid for a water-hog like a data center to even want to build in the desert, where water resources are cherished. And data centers *SHOULD* be voted down in areas that don't the water resources needed to run a large data center.
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There has been a glut of these starting in Michigan because of our access to water. I've been closely tied in with 5 so far. First, an un-named entity through lawyers requests a rezoning of a certain area. No one knows what the rezoning is for....just that some entity wants it rezoned. Most folks ignore this. But once it's re-zoned, they are 90% of the way there.
Next they submit a site plan. Again, through a lawyer or third party entity that has nothing to do with data centers. These site plans ar
Re: (Score:2)
> Who isn't surprised that Tucson, AZ and Chandler, AZ both voted down data centers recently? It is stupid for a water-hog like a data center to even want to build in the desert, where water resources are cherished. And data centers *SHOULD* be voted down in areas that don't the water resources needed to run a large data center.
It's much easier to run fiber than to build an aqueduct.
They need better ads. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure who is paying for it, but here locally at least the morning news has been flooding the zone during their ad breaks with ads about what "Positives" building datacenters in your area has. The ad literally states simply:
A) Building new datacenters in your area will lower the cost of electricity for everyone.
B) Building new datacenters in your area will lower taxes for everyone.
C) Building new datacenters in your area will increase property value for every home owner.
D) Building new datacenters in your area will create massive numbers of new jobs.
On point A? Even my more brain-dead coworkers have been bitching about this one. "How does adding huge demand on electricity lower the cost of electricity?" Yup. You're not even fooling the red hat wearers on that point. Best to hire an actual propaganda / ad firm to come up with something that at least the easily led folks will believe. You can't just state the opposite of facts and expect everyone to climb aboard automatically just because you said it.
Point B? Considering how cities tend to throw free money at any big business enterprise to build in an area, and increase taxes on the general population in order to do so, yeah, I wouldn't count on that one being true.
Point C? Arguably, there may be a minor increase in property value for businesses building directly in the path of the datacenter, due to the possibility of future growth of said datacenter, but home property values will most likely drop as noise pollution from the circulation systems and other background hum issues that we're only now starting to realize have an effect on humans and surrounding wildlife will take a toll.
Point D? There will be a minor construction worker uptick during the build out. A few engineers will be needed for spin-up. Then every one of those jobs will disappear save for maybe one to two long-term engineers to replace faulty disks and power supplies, perhaps upgrade systems if the datacenter keeps running long enough, and make sure the cooling systems don't collapse on themselves during the hottest days of the year. The rest are extremely temporary jobs that will come and go in a boom/bust cycle that will leave swaths of unemployable people in their wake, and most folks are well aware of how that works out. Even in my area we've seen datacenter build-outs lead to quick increases in employment, followed by a long-lasting bunch of folks that aren't really needed once the build-out is complete.
:Get better propaganda if you really expect the country to jump for joy over building out datacenters to spin up AIs that will replace entire workforces. Figure out how to spin it as hope for the common man. Because right now, the message is, "Let us create more AI to continue to consolidate wealth among the very few while we put massive numbers of you out of a job! It'll be awesome." And that message is not really working for most of us.
Re: (Score:2)
Their problem is there is no upside for the local communities, so they either have to lie and hope people believe it, or tell the truth and have people reject it outright.
I heard one being honest, when criticized about increased energy costs, lack of likely new jobs, strain on water supply, their only response was "but you can be part of the AI revolution!"
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> Their problem is there is no upside for the local communities, so they either have to lie and hope people believe it, or tell the truth and have people reject it outright.
> I heard one being honest, when criticized about increased energy costs, lack of likely new jobs, strain on water supply, their only response was "but you can be part of the AI revolution!"
Yeah, I've heard that line thrown around too. They need better messaging all the way around, because "The AI revolution" already has dumbasses saying publicly that humans should be happy to die to make way for the AIs. That's bad messaging to humans, and they're too stupid to understand why some of us don't want yet another reason to be depressed.
Re: (Score:3)
Not to really disagree but my own takes would be
A) does not specify a time horizon. Over a long enough period increased supply usually does follow increased demand, and prices usually do drop. Look at the inflation adjusted cost for refined gasoline in 1912 vs today.. It would be around $5.80 a gallon national average. Will the price of electricity come down enough to help the individual in their life time as far as total savings (my bet is unlikely )
B) Lots of communities drive very large portions of thei
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> Over a long enough period increased supply usually does follow increased demand,
There's two problematic assumptions here. One is that the facility will be operating at the same capacity long term. Take Microsoft's will they / won't they with Wisconsin data centers or even Foxconn. Businesses can change courses a lot quicker than power plant build outs. So that time horizon is notoriously problematic especially with government incentives in the mix.
Continuing using Wisconsin as a second example, they've have had to delay the [1]decommissioning of the coal plants with expensive results [utilitydive.com].
That
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wisconsin-utilities-coal-retirement-miso-delay/626005/
"It's becoming a huge problem," (Score:2)
No, it's always been a huge problem. As people wise up, and they will, they will make certain it's a problem for the people causing it, instead of everyone else.
Datacenters will lobby state legislators (Score:1)
and the federal government to override local governments. They'll do this under the guise of"
We need state-level or federal-level consistency in zoning laws for data centers".
There is too much data center investment money sloshing around and that will be used to override the wishes of the citizenry.
they should be voted out (Score:2)
high water use, high electric bills, low employment; what’s not to love?
How much of a nuisance are they, really? (Score:1)
All facilities are a nuisance: factories, roads, power plants, landfills, airports, etc... NIMBY is there for a reason.
But I would like to think that datacenters are low on the nuisance scale. In fact I have never noticed a datacenter by myself, someone has to point me at what looks like some nondescript office building and tell me "it is a datacenter" for me to notice. Maybe giant datacenters are different, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were less of a nuisance than the farmland they replace. Farmlan
NIMBYS Are Stupid (Score:2)
These are the same people who bitch about traffic...while simultaneously fighting against road construction. They complain their taxes are going up...but won't let any new businesses or development come in to increase the tax base.
They use to fight against cell phone towers...they threaten suits over fraud because their phone doesn't work at their house. Oh...but they don't want the towers anywhere near them. Phone still has to work, but no towers.
Self-centered pricks.
The Balrog Protocol (Score:2)
The hum of the servers reverberated through the air, a distant, omnipresent sound, as the team approached the sprawling data center, hidden deep within the mountains of silicon. Sam’s gaze was fixed on the towering rows of machines, each one a node in a vast, interconnected network. He could feel the weight of the computational power pulsing from the racks of GPUs and TPUs.
An intelligence being forged in real-time, learning, adapting, growing at a pace far beyond human control. Far below, in the co
One of these proposed near my home (Score:2)
There's a proposal to build a "small" (24 MW) data center literally within walking distance of my home. [1]utility press release [lbwl.com] [2]newspaper article [lansingstatejournal.com] I haven't submitted my own public commnent on it yet, and I actually might be weakly in favor of it. It's "different", planning to use the waste heat as part of the city's municipal hot-water supply (used to heat State Government buildings and other downtown buildings).
The site in question is currently deep-discount overflow parking for the city's minor-league bas
[1] https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-green-proposes-120-million-sustainable-data-center-investment
[2] https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2025/12/15/lansing-downtown-deep-green-data-centers/87708221007/
Finally! (Score:2)
I am starting to regain my trust in people. I know I'll regret it, but for now, it feels good! Sad thing is that it took a *financial* stick to hit them over the head to realise the scam that GenAI is. Blatant IP rights abuse? Pfft, those pesky artists should get a real job. Job loss? It won't hit me, for sure, I'm a pliumber, haha! Environmental impact? As long as it's not *my* backyard, I don't care. But electricity becoming more expensive? Oh, that's a no go! I'll take it, nevertheless. (yes, I exclu
Didn't some call it an "AI factory"? (Score:2)
If it's a factory (and it basically is), it should be limited as factories in terms of zoning and all that.
... Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Grassroots activism isn't necessarily the best defense, but perhaps this is the pin that will prick the AI bubble. These datacenters are not _needed_. They are part of the bubble.
Re:... Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. While I doubt these people understand the problem, they are doing good by accident. The less money invested when the bubble pops and it all crashes, the shorter and less devastating the recession afterwards.
Re:... Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they understand their electric bill going up. They might not understand the few jobs it brings in after complete, or the water shortages that they will cause, or the increase in noise. But the do understand their electric bill going up.
Re: (Score:2)
What I was referring to is that they probably do not understand that LLM-type AI is a bubble.
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Trust me, here in SW IN people really really really really understand the problem of electric bills skyrocketing. Besides the corruption and also a president ordering a coal-fired electric plant a few miles from here to stay open after its rainbow bridge date, there has been STRONG activism against the incumbent electric provider. They may find themselves having to deal with torches and pitchforks soon. The local datacenter project got something like 100/3 against/support for this exact reason.
Re:... Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they understand just fine, it was when they didn't understand that these companies could build the datacenters.
I remember a few years back a community realizing years too late that the big datacenter project they were so excited for was a bad deal. They saw the square footage, and remembered how many long term jobs that meant when a textile company had a facility of similar scale, and made assumptions based on that. Then they just had this huge energy and water suck with a handful of low level jobs.
Now they understand better that the datacenters are completely useless to the local economy, which is at least for them the big problem.
Even if the bubble turned out to be durable, it would *still* be bad for the local communities blighted by these datacenters. The boom/bust doesn't even matter for their concerns.