Comment by toss1
17 hours ago
If the data centers paid for their own negative externalities instead of foisting them off on the local people, the local people wouldn't be so pissed off.
Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Sucking gigawatts from the grid and making the rest of the people pay for the necessary upgrades is not a way to make friends.
Putting up scores of loud and polluting diesel or methane generators running 24/7/365 for main power, not just backup, without mitigating the noise and pollution, so a mile away it is 70dB on someone's front porch day and night, will really piss people off.
If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
And it is not like the companies putting up the data centers do not have the money to do it right. They just lack the attitude to consider their effect on others.
If a new rich neighbor decided to park their semi-truck on your lawn idling all night, or pipe their sewage through your apartment water intake, you wouldn't be happy about those negative externalities either. The only "incredibly fucking stupid" thing I see here is the attitude in the post to which I'm replying.
You're repeating a false story.
Most of the concerns are massively overblown. For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid. With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water, so that it doesn't have any continual draw on the local water supply. And even the legacy data center water cooling systems that draws on local water supply consumes less than 3% of what U.S. gulf courses consume. Every industry uses water. This idea that this industry is especially bad as a consequence of that is simply ignorant.
>If they just pay the full actual costs of what they are doing, most people would be fine with it.
I'm skeptical that this would have any impact at all. Considering how much less data centers pollute than other industries, relative to the economic value they generate, and the disproportionate amount of hostility they receive, I don't see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement. Most of those complaining about data centers don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations, meaning that this is just a pretense for their opposition, not the motivation for it.
>>For instance, new regulations require data centers to bring their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. They are deployed off-grid.
I see no national regulation of actual usage (the proposed Hawley-Warren act would require only reporting. And even if some national legislation/regulation did materialize, off-grid power generation is a trend because of insufficient grid supply and throughput, and regulating grid usage does NOT solve the problems of off-grid power gen, which right now typically involves massive diesel or NatGas generators which are the actual source of massive noise and air pollution.
>>With respect to water, the new trend is closed-loop water cooling, or using treated waste water
Yes closed-loop water cooling is obviously better and it is good to see that trend. That does NOT solve the problem of massive water usage required for 5+ years of construction, e.g., in this town [0]
>>relative to the economic value they generate Right now, that economic value is massively negative [1], possibly the greatest bonfire of money in human history. It MAY generate positive return, but just as with mini-/personal computers and the internet, end up being just the table stakes to run a business.
>>see any kind of empirical basis for the anti-data center movement Start with the entirely plausible likely results of damaging society as social media has done — the exact mechanisms couldn't be predicted at the time, but certainly resulted in harm. AI is even more massively unpredictable, and in an already unstable society, there is little reason to not worry. I say that as a frequent and avid AI user who does find value in it. I absolutely cannot say fears are unfounded.
>>don't even know about the new 'Bring Your Own Power Supply' regulations Those regulations are 1) at best, nascent, 2) are definitely incomplete, and 3) do not address the problems of bringing your own power, which is exactly what has trashed neighborhoods around data centers bringing their own power [2]; i.e., BYOP is part of the problem against which people are protesting. That is totally legitimate protest reasons; go read about it instead of pontificating from ignorance and false hypotheticals.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/data-center-used...
[1] https://isaiprofitable.com/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
Most of these critisms would apply to ANY major industrial build out.
You can't bemoan America becoming an import nation that doesn't produce valuable goods/services that the world wants, and then sabotage every industrial build out that can fix that problem.
As for value, I was only talking about the product — in the GDP sense — that a data center outputs.
While bubble industries can lead to companies running loss leaders, the realities of the AI industry show enormous underlying supply side and demand side development.
The cost per token has declined at an exponential rate while LLM performance has skyrocketed. AI is also the fastest adopted good or service in human history. That is the most objective judge of whether it adds value to people's lives.
As for the risks, yes any new industry introduces new risks and so the temptation is to clamp down. But taking fewer visible risks can increase your total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
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> Sucking 30% of the water from the town's water system without paying for it and reducing everyone's water pressure is not a way to make friends.
Huh? What's this one? Which data centre sucks 30% of water?
This one
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/data-center-used...
Not only that, while the closed-loop water-cooling systems are indeed a good idea, they do NOT solve the problem of water consumption during the years of construction, which is exactly the problem in this instance to which I was referring.
Where did you get the 30% figure? I think this was a mistake - it was 30 million gallons which is <1% of the county's water usage.
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