In Oklahoma, they tried to market a bitcoin farm project as a datacenter. It received a lot of opposition due to the noise levels anticipated.
The graft team tried to get the state government to give tax graft to "datacenters" but didn't define what a DC was - which could mean the graft might go to bitcoin farms as well.
I noticed that the article does not really distinguish between any of these.
Please excuse my English, graft is not my first language.
I think noise pollution regulation would be a great way to stop undesired effects that spread from one property to another.
Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses. This prevents many solutions from ever being tried.
> Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses
Probably because history is full of developers promising to mitigate certain negative consequences and then failing to do so. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, so this history of developers being awful matters a lot to me: it galvanizes the opposition.
Unlike many other common private infrastructure projects being spun up, such as large warehouses or factory buildings, data centers don't employ large amounts of people except during the construction.
Without much tangible benefits to help uplift a surrounding community in some way, and certainly many tangible drawbacks known to communities at this point, they seem like an easy - the easiest? - NIMBY target in an era where corporate giants have burned a lot of trust.
“Local opposition” and NIMBYism is the primary reason we have a housing shortage, it’s a rampant problem across the US. The few grumpy old folks that show up to local planning meetings shouldn’t hold us back as a nation. Until we can find a way to get over that hump I’m not sure how we'll move forward in many aspects.
Location is not fungible, and at least in my local area, data center developers seem to want to place their datacenters in up-and-coming areas, where they would block the development of higher-quality structures.
There's no reason the datacenters can't be built in the middle of nowhere, far from people, especially as they don't provide any jobs to the community.
Housing doesn’t benefit the local community(from most NIMBY perspectives). It makes housing more affordable lowering their property values, creates the need for more infrastructure and creates change in their environment.
The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.
It is not just "grumpy old folks", almost everyone who own property, no matter the age fights development.
Seems the only people that do not actively fight development are the working poor. That is because either they work multiple jobs or have travel issues.
Every time I read about a purported "housing shortage" I'm reminded that there are about 140 million housing units in the US[0], with an average of 5.5 rooms per unit[1], or about 700 million rooms, all that for 350 million of population, or about 2 rooms per person.
This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.
Surely most people can recognize the difference between NIMBY of a noisy wasteful cover for Bitcoin mining operation compared to the NIMBY of not wanting "the poors" nearby or the ability to retain high rent charges on hoarded housing. Housing shortage NIMBY and "don't put an industrial facility in my backyard" are really very different things.
most ycombinator folks can't seem to distinguish things outside the software realm. Maybe if all these super ultra mega smart engineers and developers could focus on utilizing existing hardware more efficient we wouldn't need to constantly build these energy sinks.
Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.
Megacities are a problem everywhere. We have not yet found a scalable way to improve the economy without resorting to unnatural concentrations of people. Still, hope must be kept high, and the battle must go on.
This is very similar to the economic destruction wrought by those who block housing in the most highly productive geographic regions of the country.
By taking what would be a positive sum situation and changing it into zero sum, productive capital growth is shifted into rentier capital growth. It shifts wealth from those who use use capital to make us all wealthier to those who hoard capital and reap the work of others.
> This is very similar to the economic destruction wrought by those who block housing in the most highly productive geographic regions of the country.
It's not. You are just repeating Cloud providers' talking point.
Housing is a basic need, and I such many people including myself wouldn't mind overruling the locals' preferences in order to make sure everyone can have access to housing at a decent price.
Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them. As a matter of fact the majority of them exist because companies worth hundreds of billions of dollar use cloud-based walled garden to milk consumers in ways they couldn't if the software was local.
> Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them.
And here you're just repeating the same arguments that NIMBYs use to block housing. And saying "you're using the same arguments as X, X is bad, therefore your argument is bad" is nat actually a sound argument in itself, I point it out because it's ironic when you accuse me of repeating Cloud provider's talking points!
Where the NIMBY argument actually falls down in that the assessment of "too many." How is that determined? Why is your answer right and the person who wants a datacenter wrong?
And don't you see that your determination of "too much" is exactly what converts productive capital allocation into rentier capital allocation? What happens if you are right and the cloud provider is wrong? The cloud providers spends a bunch of money building a datacenter that doesn't get used, and loses lots of money, and pays property taxes to the local government. If you are wrong, then existing data centers are able to jack up their prices a ton, and will, and make a lot more money not because they are providing a better service, but because there's an artificial shortage. It rewards speculation, and incentivizes speculation on land uses.
If China's chip industry takes off maybe they will pick up the slack? Otherwise it isn't obvious to me where the data centres will get built. Europe probably doesn't want them for environmental concerns, Africa probably isn't a good option. South America, maybe? Greater Asia seems like an obvious choice.
They could, for the most part at least, just not get built. So much of the current and new capacity is destined for nonsense like AI, would be better to simply not expand that.
Why would someone want a data center near them? They provide fewer jobs than other projects of similar size, they consume huge amounts of local resources, and most are paired with significant tax breaks.
Really? What are some similar sized projects? An alfalfa farm in the desert, for example, employs almost nobody, pays nothing in taxes (may even be a net consumer of taxes due to subsidies) and consumes 100x-1000x the water. These are the direct tradeoffs for new Nevada data centers.
Largely unaddressed by this article is whether these projects are being "canceled" as in there will be less capacity overall or being completed elsewhere (as is indicated about at least one of the "canceled" projects).
Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
>Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
In terms of how these projects will get built, I assume they're quite similar - the bigger difference is that we're talking about tech companies and startups who may lose an early market advantage or run out of runway if their project is delayed two years.
Lumen orbit, the DC-in-space startup, might run out of runway if they space construction suppliers delay their project by two years for example.
This is in comparison to office buildings or automotive, where big delays can be a lot of trouble but not the end of the company.
The parade of misleading and exaggerated hit pieces in the news must be seen as part of the integrated plan to destroy American science, information, and research.
> In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
Had this set the precedent of working with the community, and _not_ breaking the law, I think we'd be in a better place all around.
Similarly, Amazon tried to take the excess nuclear power, without paying back into the electrical grid infrastructure, and got denied in 2024:
Yeah, that politico article conveniently leaves out that the TVA - the local electricity provider - runs a methane-powered gas power plant literally 200 meters down the road (which replaced a much dirtier coal-burning power station at the same location), but somehow could not be bothered actually hooking their neighbours up to the grid.
> Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
Yes, yes and maybe, if it needs to be accelerated.
No part of our modern life would exist without scientific and engineering advancement. Centuries of inventions and discoveries have built on top of each other to give us the very essential (housing, plumbing, food production) that are vast improvements on the original as well as the very boutique (space travel, self-driving cars, AI), the benefits from which are not fully realized yet. Pressing pause on science is guaranteed to cause misery. The last time Europe did that it lead to the Dark and Middle ages, leading to centuries of suffering.
Science is one of those few things that benefits everyone, from the very rich to the very poor. It's how we ensure that life does not remain a zero-sum game, it's how we grow the pie so that everyone can have more. Science is not free: It comes at a cost, but that cost is repaid many times over.
_This_ article is objective. The opposition this article is discussing has been whipped into existence by the past year or so of exaggerated hit pieces.
In Oklahoma, they tried to market a bitcoin farm project as a datacenter. It received a lot of opposition due to the noise levels anticipated.
The graft team tried to get the state government to give tax graft to "datacenters" but didn't define what a DC was - which could mean the graft might go to bitcoin farms as well.
I noticed that the article does not really distinguish between any of these.
Please excuse my English, graft is not my first language.
I think noise pollution regulation would be a great way to stop undesired effects that spread from one property to another.
Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses. This prevents many solutions from ever being tried.
> Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses
Probably because history is full of developers promising to mitigate certain negative consequences and then failing to do so. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, so this history of developers being awful matters a lot to me: it galvanizes the opposition.
8 replies →
Unlike many other common private infrastructure projects being spun up, such as large warehouses or factory buildings, data centers don't employ large amounts of people except during the construction.
Without much tangible benefits to help uplift a surrounding community in some way, and certainly many tangible drawbacks known to communities at this point, they seem like an easy - the easiest? - NIMBY target in an era where corporate giants have burned a lot of trust.
They actually have NEGATIVE benefits such as sucking up the resources like electricity and water.
“Local opposition” and NIMBYism is the primary reason we have a housing shortage, it’s a rampant problem across the US. The few grumpy old folks that show up to local planning meetings shouldn’t hold us back as a nation. Until we can find a way to get over that hump I’m not sure how we'll move forward in many aspects.
Except at least housing provides benefits to the local community.
A data centre provides almost no jobs (except during construction), and draws a significant amount of resources (electricity, water, noise pollution).
Why should any community want something that only enriches Amazon taking up vast swaths of land in their backyard?
> significant amount of resources
Most importantly, location!
Location is not fungible, and at least in my local area, data center developers seem to want to place their datacenters in up-and-coming areas, where they would block the development of higher-quality structures.
There's no reason the datacenters can't be built in the middle of nowhere, far from people, especially as they don't provide any jobs to the community.
2 replies →
Housing doesn’t benefit the local community(from most NIMBY perspectives). It makes housing more affordable lowering their property values, creates the need for more infrastructure and creates change in their environment.
The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.
7 replies →
It is not just "grumpy old folks", almost everyone who own property, no matter the age fights development.
Seems the only people that do not actively fight development are the working poor. That is because either they work multiple jobs or have travel issues.
Statistically speaking, the homeowners in the US are not young.
1 reply →
The “YIMBY” movement is completely dominated by 20-40yo middle class professionals in my experience.
3 replies →
Every time I read about a purported "housing shortage" I'm reminded that there are about 140 million housing units in the US[0], with an average of 5.5 rooms per unit[1], or about 700 million rooms, all that for 350 million of population, or about 2 rooms per person.
This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest...
[1] https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
Sorry, are you suggesting that the solution to housing shortage is to move into an existing building with strangers?
3 replies →
Surely most people can recognize the difference between NIMBY of a noisy wasteful cover for Bitcoin mining operation compared to the NIMBY of not wanting "the poors" nearby or the ability to retain high rent charges on hoarded housing. Housing shortage NIMBY and "don't put an industrial facility in my backyard" are really very different things.
most ycombinator folks can't seem to distinguish things outside the software realm. Maybe if all these super ultra mega smart engineers and developers could focus on utilizing existing hardware more efficient we wouldn't need to constantly build these energy sinks.
Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.
Megacities are a problem everywhere. We have not yet found a scalable way to improve the economy without resorting to unnatural concentrations of people. Still, hope must be kept high, and the battle must go on.
> Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.
Huh? There are housing shortages in plenty of low-density places.
This is very similar to the economic destruction wrought by those who block housing in the most highly productive geographic regions of the country.
By taking what would be a positive sum situation and changing it into zero sum, productive capital growth is shifted into rentier capital growth. It shifts wealth from those who use use capital to make us all wealthier to those who hoard capital and reap the work of others.
> This is very similar to the economic destruction wrought by those who block housing in the most highly productive geographic regions of the country.
It's not. You are just repeating Cloud providers' talking point.
Housing is a basic need, and I such many people including myself wouldn't mind overruling the locals' preferences in order to make sure everyone can have access to housing at a decent price.
Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them. As a matter of fact the majority of them exist because companies worth hundreds of billions of dollar use cloud-based walled garden to milk consumers in ways they couldn't if the software was local.
> Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them.
And here you're just repeating the same arguments that NIMBYs use to block housing. And saying "you're using the same arguments as X, X is bad, therefore your argument is bad" is nat actually a sound argument in itself, I point it out because it's ironic when you accuse me of repeating Cloud provider's talking points!
Where the NIMBY argument actually falls down in that the assessment of "too many." How is that determined? Why is your answer right and the person who wants a datacenter wrong?
And don't you see that your determination of "too much" is exactly what converts productive capital allocation into rentier capital allocation? What happens if you are right and the cloud provider is wrong? The cloud providers spends a bunch of money building a datacenter that doesn't get used, and loses lots of money, and pays property taxes to the local government. If you are wrong, then existing data centers are able to jack up their prices a ton, and will, and make a lot more money not because they are providing a better service, but because there's an artificial shortage. It rewards speculation, and incentivizes speculation on land uses.
1 reply →
If China's chip industry takes off maybe they will pick up the slack? Otherwise it isn't obvious to me where the data centres will get built. Europe probably doesn't want them for environmental concerns, Africa probably isn't a good option. South America, maybe? Greater Asia seems like an obvious choice.
They could, for the most part at least, just not get built. So much of the current and new capacity is destined for nonsense like AI, would be better to simply not expand that.
Why would someone want a data center near them? They provide fewer jobs than other projects of similar size, they consume huge amounts of local resources, and most are paired with significant tax breaks.
Really? What are some similar sized projects? An alfalfa farm in the desert, for example, employs almost nobody, pays nothing in taxes (may even be a net consumer of taxes due to subsidies) and consumes 100x-1000x the water. These are the direct tradeoffs for new Nevada data centers.
Farming alfalfa in the desert has to be one of worst business ideas I’ve read.
5 replies →
Largely unaddressed by this article is whether these projects are being "canceled" as in there will be less capacity overall or being completed elsewhere (as is indicated about at least one of the "canceled" projects).
Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
>Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
In terms of how these projects will get built, I assume they're quite similar - the bigger difference is that we're talking about tech companies and startups who may lose an early market advantage or run out of runway if their project is delayed two years.
Lumen orbit, the DC-in-space startup, might run out of runway if they space construction suppliers delay their project by two years for example.
This is in comparison to office buildings or automotive, where big delays can be a lot of trouble but not the end of the company.
How will this impact AI 2027's legacy?
The parade of misleading and exaggerated hit pieces in the news must be seen as part of the integrated plan to destroy American science, information, and research.
or... maybe there's something to people being skeptical of datacenters?
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/musks-xai-opera...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
> In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
Had this set the precedent of working with the community, and _not_ breaking the law, I think we'd be in a better place all around.
Similarly, Amazon tried to take the excess nuclear power, without paying back into the electrical grid infrastructure, and got denied in 2024:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ferc-interconnection-isa-ta...
and again in April of 2025:
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-16/article-6937/ferc-denies...
Yeah, that politico article conveniently leaves out that the TVA - the local electricity provider - runs a methane-powered gas power plant literally 200 meters down the road (which replaced a much dirtier coal-burning power station at the same location), but somehow could not be bothered actually hooking their neighbours up to the grid.
3 replies →
This seems like a pretty objective view of all sides. What makes you think it's a hit piece?
Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
> Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
Yes, yes and maybe, if it needs to be accelerated.
No part of our modern life would exist without scientific and engineering advancement. Centuries of inventions and discoveries have built on top of each other to give us the very essential (housing, plumbing, food production) that are vast improvements on the original as well as the very boutique (space travel, self-driving cars, AI), the benefits from which are not fully realized yet. Pressing pause on science is guaranteed to cause misery. The last time Europe did that it lead to the Dark and Middle ages, leading to centuries of suffering.
Science is one of those few things that benefits everyone, from the very rich to the very poor. It's how we ensure that life does not remain a zero-sum game, it's how we grow the pie so that everyone can have more. Science is not free: It comes at a cost, but that cost is repaid many times over.
2 replies →
_This_ article is objective. The opposition this article is discussing has been whipped into existence by the past year or so of exaggerated hit pieces.