The article is interesting, but I think it dances around what should be a central point, only approaching it obliquely. A lot of the opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors.
> My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
Essentially, I think there's a proximal reputational problem for AI companies, which the article calls out, but the ultimate problem is factual. It's not an education/communication/negotiation issue, because the real problem is the underlying reality. The wolf at the door being distrusted is because it's a wolf, not PR.
"A lot of opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors."
HN commenters favouring data centers never seem to address this either. It appears they just don't get it
If someone does not like "AI" software nor the people behind it, then it makes little sense to argue about electricity, water, eminent domain, etc.
Big Tech founders have claimed that the public "trusts" them because the public uses ("chooses") their software. But does this amount to "real world" trust
This former Google employee, not operating under an anonymous username, says to a live audience at 19:00 that "Don't be evil", as suggested at a company meeting by a fellow employee in June 2000, was in fact meant to be a joke
> >"A lot of opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors."
>HN commenters favouring data centers never seem to address this either. It
>appears they just don't get it.
Can you point me to some comments favouring data centers? I know people get the opinion that I favour things that I do not because I challenge unsupported claims against them. I have a tendency to defend against any criticism that I feel to be unfair. This seems to conflict with a point of view that any argument that moves people to your cause is a good argument, whether it is valid or not. The sense that perception is truth is ingrained into a lot of people subconsciously, and there are a cynical few who believe it explicitly.
The problem with the "known to be bad actors" argument is that an action is assumed to be done with bad intentions because they are bad actors, which is then used as evidence that they are bad actors.
There are definitely bad actions, and each should be addressed. There are few organisations that perform bad actions as a goal. Religion and other ideologies followed to a similar extent can provide that. Self interest rarely does. This is where Larry the Lawnmower becomes a useful demonstration, A lawnmower is not your enemy, even if it does chop your hand off.
>If someone does not like "AI" software nor the people behind it, then it makes little sense to argue about electricity, water, eminent domain, etc.
People know this. But they also know that not liking something (and I think hate is not too strong a word for the depth of feeling here) just because of what it is, is prejudice. People do not want to be bigots so they argue the issues. Electricity, Water, intellectual property, competition for work, intellectual property, privacy, etc. Those are all individual issues each with their own properties. If a person has a wide variety of individual issues like that and they decide against a single thing like AI, then there are only a few options. It is either a massive coincidence, a sign of prejudice, or the coordinated work of someone who is explicitly aligned against you.
The same would, of course, would have to be true for those people aligned against you. If all of their thoughts supported one result they would be similarly be prejudiced. So if you take the path of assuming they are against you, you cannot accept that they would do anything to address your concerns.
This leads to what was stated above
>Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
I'm not even sure that what the article says is true when they say
"Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity"
I think there is an awareness, but also a sense that there is nothing that can be done except ignore it. If they do the bad thing, they will be vilified. If they do the good thing, no-one will believe it and they will be vilified. Once trust has been lost, there is no point in engaging. Any attempt to regain trust would be seen as an attempt at further manipulation.
We live in a world where people will look you in the eye and say with absolute certainty that the fact that "Don't be evil" was taken out of the Google code supports the idea they are bad actors.
Yet to this day, the last line of their code of conduct says...
"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Last updated July 16, 2026"
People will say that with such confidence that, If I say it is not true, they enthusiastically search it up, express surprise that the "don't be evil" is still there, and then say that it means nothing, because it's their actions that matter.
...and that is the truth. It _is_ their actions that matter. That's precisely what I push back on things that claim to know what their actions will be based upon some hidden state that they believe can be divined. The sense of certainty that they are malevolent, because they did a thing that was interpreted as a bad thing because they were assumed to be malevolent.
People, organisations, corporations, and governments can all do bad things. They can all do good things. We can judge their deeds better than we can judge their intentions.
Perhaps instead of "We don't believe you" people could just start with "I would like to believe you, show me how"
As you say, the distrust is backed up by evidence and by their own personal experience of the same promises getting trotted out time after time, generation after generation.
These people, these communities, have been promised these same things before (or things adjacent to them) and have seen them not deliver, or even make their situation worse.
This is especially true of the tax income and job generation elements. The estimates provided as part of the deal are utterly divorced from reality- people know it and refuse to take part in the kayfabe that surrounds it.
The other part is: if there really is so much money in these, it should be easy for the companies to produce an actually good deal. Everyone can tell (after all these experiences) what bullshit smells like, when the deals are full of tricks. Why try the tricks--property taxes that pay eventually, jobs that will show up eventually, promises that electric bills won't go up--when you could guarantee the results, and guarantee the town won't be left holding the bag?
Well of course it's because the companies think they don't have to give a good deal. That they can get away with it.
One wonders if at this point they would have saved money not trying to fuck people over to get what they wanted. I hope so. The ideal world has companies doing things the honest way because it's honest, but I'd settle for them doing it that way because they're economically incentivized to do so.
Corporate America is trapped in a race to the bottom - if you do the 'right' thing and say, don't negotiate hard for tax breaks from the host city or get some sort of predatory preferred pricing from the utilities providers to the detriment of local residents, 1) your shareholders might go after you for not maximising profit and 2) your competitors will do these things anyway and undercut you.
mostly unrelated but amusing: I keep getting fliers from Google fiber trying to get me to switch. Every one has this one bizarre line in it: "our customers have never had their rates go up!"---as if I am too stupid to realize that is not a promise. Now, I have no idea if that works on other people. Maybe enough other people are stupid and don't notice that that's not a promise that turns out to be good ad copy. But I am personally so put off by the disrespectful attempt at manipulation that I consider switching less, even though it might well save me money. It is significantly worse for them, as a sales tactic, than if they had written nothing there at all.
> It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
I feel like this is projection. If you look at the list of top brands ranked by a variety of dimensions (trust, innovativeness, brand value, etc.) over the past multiple years, Big Tech companies regularly rank amongst the top 100.
The HN population, being mostly in the tech industry, is aware of all the shenanigans these companies pull and that has colored our views. But the rest of the general population... not so much. I mean, even Meta properties still rank highly despite all the things we know Meta has been doing pretty much since inception.
You raise an interesting point. If we look at Mag7: Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla: All of they are probably building data centers at a furious pace. (Honestly, I'm not sure if NVIDIA needs as many as the other six.) However, we do not see great opposition to their own data centers. Why? My guess: They are incredibly careful about how they plan data center expansion to reduce brand impact. Most of the opposition seems to be directed towards (1) pure play data center builders/operators who are mostly B2B and don't care as much about their brand retail reputation (2) pure AI/LLM companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. About (2): I wonder is the pushback deeper than the data center environmental impact and more about pushback against the unknown: "The Singularity with take all of our jobs.", etc.
"We can't trust them" is the foundation of practically every conspiracy theory, though, from times immemorial. I remember people protesting against cell towers, and it was exactly what their arguments were built around: "We don't believe this thing won't fry our brains". It was the same before with electrical lines, and I guess steam power had its share too. Not telling a concerned citizen is obliged to trust everyone, marketing & propaganda were part of "underlying reality" for centuries at least. But frankly, you made it sound like it's a novel thing, a dark omen of evil AI times, or something.
The difference being that AI companies are destroying all sorts of stuff, and cellphone companies didn't - they just provided cellphones.
Society did decay because of cellphones but it wasn't anything to do with the cellphone companies. The towers always were exactly what the cellphone companies said they were.
The difference in attitude between cell phone conspiracy theories and data center conspiracy theories is almost entirely driven by the media reporting on them. The media (correctly) identifies people worried about cell phone radiation affecting their health as crackpots. But because the Anglosphere media establishment itself is threatened by the tech industry at large, it not only fails to report on anti-datacenter sentiment among uninformed people as similar crackpottery, it amplifies basically-inaccurate negative memes about data centers such as their water use.
You raise a good point. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s. Every few months there were interviews and investigations on a local news programme about how using a mobile phone might cause brain cancer. Or living near above ground power lines caused all kinds of imaginary illnesses. From what I can see, most of those crazy people moved on to a new conspiracy theory. I cannot remember the last time that I saw any serious media coverage of either issue from my childhood.
This is an example of the same problem as the article; you're treating trust as entirely unrelated to reality. It can get out-of-step, but that's not the only possibility, and it's not the one we're facing here.
The problem with conspiracy theories is not that they're based on a lack of trust, but that they're not rational. Sometimes a lack of trust is perfectly rational.
Cell towers don't actually fry your brains. Steam powered trains don't move so fast you suffocate. However, the big tech CEOs are absolutely going to take your data and use it against you. They are going to build data centers that harm your community. The fear here is reasonable and evidenced.
This isn't unique to AI, but AI is the current iteration of the same problem. Sometimes people distrust outsiders because they're star-bellied sneetches, but sometimes they distrust them because they're the British empire. You can't treat all distrust as unreasoning.
I have a property in NW Wisconsin. It's incredibly poor there - it seems like most people working age are on disability - the new form of welfare. Money is earned mostly in summer and hunting seasons. It's pretty depressing. Lots of alcohol problems. I hired someone to clear some trees and make lumber out of them once and he showed up for the job three months later. At least he showed up though. Weirdest thing - he never came back after the job to get paid. I end up often hiring contractors from 90 miles away to get good ones.
But a data center wouldn't help. It would raise electric prices and doesn't really employ people.
It's kind of like one industry that is in the area - there's a company that grows huge amounts of cranberries but its mostly automated. As far as I know only three people work on this huge site. They let the cranberries grow, flood the area when they're ready. The cranberries float to the top for robots to skim the surface and harvest them. The humans just move things around for the robots.
Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".
City taxes don't fix a broken economic flywheel. State taxes go to others and also don't fix it. You need a functional economy with jobs, income, spending and all that jazz. A small amount of taxes with no second order benefits is worth relatively little.
A school and hospital would do that more than a data center tho. Look at Merced California, used to be a nowhere destination. They built a UC there and now it’s a place students, PhDs and MDs from around the world want to move to. If UC Merced were a data center it would attract no one, it would drain and pollute the lake, and Merced CA would still be a nowhere destination.
A good portion of this movement is irrational and driven by viral media. Last week a coworker was talking about how unbearably loud data centers are. I asked them if our parking lot is loud. (There’s a decent sized server floor in our building and a bunch of cooling equipment in the parking lot.) They had never noticed the cooling system.
On the other hand, my city gave the local data centers big tax breaks to come here. In the last couple years my property taxes have increased significantly along with my electricity bill. It seems obvious that I’m subsidizing the local data center. There’s probably a couple dozen people who work there, so it’s not a realistic employment opportunity for me or anyone I know. I’m not anti-tech at all, but I wish the city hadn’t made the deal they did. Perhaps big tech could be less parasitic and contribute beneficially to society?
There's a big psychological difference between the noise level in a transitory space like an office parking lot and the same noise level at a suburban home. Nobody wants their backyard, deck, or bedroom to sound like Eraserhead, even if it's subtle. (And some of the gas turbine ones are not subtle.)
I found the below line to get particularly "hard":
> When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ safety and data centers.1 These were very different concerns from those I hear in San Francisco—a city with no kids and no data centers
> "The EMF reader is shakier, going haywire under the crackling power lines, then settling down a few steps away"
That kind of statement really bothers me. Is it measuring the magnetic fields or RF emissions? If it's RF, what frequency? If the EMF reader is picking up radio waves, I'm not exactly concerned. Visible light would be weird. X-rays would be very concerning. Is it just picking up the 50/60Hz power line? That's all around you in your house anyway. If you just don't like power lines, say that
How about the smell when she drives past a huge industrial sized dairy farm? (There are a lot of them in Wisconsin.) They smell awful, like roll up your windows awful.
Some of the reaction to data center build outs has become irrational but frankly I see it as a reflection of the arrogance of the billionaire tech elite. Voters were told:
- AI is going to take your jobs
- We need to build our data centers for this job stealing tool
- We need to build so quickly that there’s no time to do accurate assessments of what this will do to water or power supplies
Turns out people don’t like that. Who could have guessed? Anyone not living in a bubble.
"AI automating jobs", which is the narrative from tech bros to raise funding translates into "AI is going to take your job", for the average Joe. If you are a graphic designer that is now struggling to find work, why would you want a data centre in your town (or anywhere)?
Rejection (or fear) of AI translating into rejection of the physical infrastructure that supports it is perfectly reasonable.
"Everyone that disagrees with me is a bot or paid propaganda". Sure, go tell yourself that. The money is clearly on the pro-AI camp, and you'd have to be delusional to think it isn't.
As a thought experiment why not just move the people who want them to those neighbourhoods and move the people who don't where the people who do live. I wonder how many would actually take that deal..
It's an elite project, being forced on us without having any choice. It is worsening inflation. It is increasing inequality. It is threatening careers. It has cheapened human creativity. Just look at how the elite of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and politics are coalescing to absurd lengths to fund and build these things. Why wouldn't you be suspicious...
Inflation and inequality are driven by the money printer far more than AI. The money printer is also driving AI, because there's far more supply of money than sensible investments to put it in.
Common citizens aren't the only ones who prefer not to live near these unsightly noise-and-pollution centers. Look at the satellite views around tech oligarchs' homes, and you won't see any data centers anywhere near those lavish estates. Let them build it in their own backyard.
The majority of people opposed AC current, cars, steam engines, rail tracks, airplanes, computers, the internet, and so on. There was always irrational fear present with new tech advances. People opposing data centers will not look any less foolish than those who opposed AC current.
I don't think the people who opposed those things look foolish even today. Most of those things, in their early days, were implemented haphazardly and with an incredible lack of regulatory oversight, and the reason they were not quite as disastrous as they could have been is that people opposed them.
And people opposing data centers today who are opposing unfettered data center creations will not look any *more* foolish than those who opposed the things you cite.
People in UK opposed train tracks in steam engine days, saying that the train engine sound scares their horses and cattle. Ofcourse data centers are far worse. But it is amusing to see how humanity continues to oppose tech and the tech buldozes anyway, like a evil monster.
How are they "far worse"? Steam trains are noisy, polluting, require tons of coal, kill animals and people in their way, and crash fairly regularly (when built with 1800s technology).
A data center is a big grey box that sits there humming quietly, and that's it. They do require power and lots of it, but unlikely steam engines they'll happily use solar, nuclear or anything else.
Noise pollution is a real issue, even for data centers that is "humming quietly". Same for its energy consumption. Water cooling is another issue, given that lots of the steam a data center generates can rain down in places that wont make the water re-join the water lifecycle easily.
You're comparing steam trains in practice to datacentres in theory. To give one example: the US federal government is suspending all sorts of environmental regulations relating to pollution, just for datacentres: why would they do that if datacentres ran on clean solar or nuclear?
I get why people wouldn't want (steam) trains in their proverbial back yard just as much as they wouldn't want datacenters. Trains may be a net benefit for a region's mobility and economy, but that doesn't undo the local disruption to people's environments. (I'm unconvinced datacenters have that impact on a region, it generates some jobs at best but most of those will be secondary/tertiary jobs. Primary jobs will be the people doing daily work in and around the site like security and maintenance, but the higher paid specialist work will be flown in or done remotely)
I tend to like not fearing starvation every year, not fearing freezing to death every year and not having the vast majority of my kids die. Industrialization led to all that.
I disagree with the “evil monster” part, but thanks for sharing that example. I’ll probably use it the opposite way in meetings .. people were deeply skeptical of railways too, yet they ended up transforming society for the better.
It's not about opposing data centers, it's about opposing them close to where you live.
There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact:
- insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away
- virtually no jobs brought to the place, besides some construction work early on
- massive drain of local resources
- massive eye sore
Like, I'm not against data centers per se, but you tell me they building one few miles from my house, I'm listing it the day I hear it and escaping as far as I can.
I'm fairly sure that most aren't any louder than other facilities of similar size. It's comes down to their cooling infrastructure and they vary widely.
It's almost like all of that is true and early train companies didn't even bring enough value to the area to offset all of that?
Trains still do that today. They cut a locality in half with only certain crossing points being allowed. But at least enough people ride the train they can feel it's worthwhile.
The article is interesting, but I think it dances around what should be a central point, only approaching it obliquely. A lot of the opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors.
> My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
Essentially, I think there's a proximal reputational problem for AI companies, which the article calls out, but the ultimate problem is factual. It's not an education/communication/negotiation issue, because the real problem is the underlying reality. The wolf at the door being distrusted is because it's a wolf, not PR.
"A lot of opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors."
HN commenters favouring data centers never seem to address this either. It appears they just don't get it
If someone does not like "AI" software nor the people behind it, then it makes little sense to argue about electricity, water, eminent domain, etc.
Big Tech founders have claimed that the public "trusts" them because the public uses ("chooses") their software. But does this amount to "real world" trust
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lH7ZVcDlnk
This former Google employee, not operating under an anonymous username, says to a live audience at 19:00 that "Don't be evil", as suggested at a company meeting by a fellow employee in June 2000, was in fact meant to be a joke
He says that he thinks Google has "strayed a bit"
> >"A lot of opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors."
>HN commenters favouring data centers never seem to address this either. It
>appears they just don't get it.
Can you point me to some comments favouring data centers? I know people get the opinion that I favour things that I do not because I challenge unsupported claims against them. I have a tendency to defend against any criticism that I feel to be unfair. This seems to conflict with a point of view that any argument that moves people to your cause is a good argument, whether it is valid or not. The sense that perception is truth is ingrained into a lot of people subconsciously, and there are a cynical few who believe it explicitly.
The problem with the "known to be bad actors" argument is that an action is assumed to be done with bad intentions because they are bad actors, which is then used as evidence that they are bad actors.
There are definitely bad actions, and each should be addressed. There are few organisations that perform bad actions as a goal. Religion and other ideologies followed to a similar extent can provide that. Self interest rarely does. This is where Larry the Lawnmower becomes a useful demonstration, A lawnmower is not your enemy, even if it does chop your hand off.
>If someone does not like "AI" software nor the people behind it, then it makes little sense to argue about electricity, water, eminent domain, etc.
People know this. But they also know that not liking something (and I think hate is not too strong a word for the depth of feeling here) just because of what it is, is prejudice. People do not want to be bigots so they argue the issues. Electricity, Water, intellectual property, competition for work, intellectual property, privacy, etc. Those are all individual issues each with their own properties. If a person has a wide variety of individual issues like that and they decide against a single thing like AI, then there are only a few options. It is either a massive coincidence, a sign of prejudice, or the coordinated work of someone who is explicitly aligned against you.
The same would, of course, would have to be true for those people aligned against you. If all of their thoughts supported one result they would be similarly be prejudiced. So if you take the path of assuming they are against you, you cannot accept that they would do anything to address your concerns.
This leads to what was stated above
>Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
I'm not even sure that what the article says is true when they say
"Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity"
I think there is an awareness, but also a sense that there is nothing that can be done except ignore it. If they do the bad thing, they will be vilified. If they do the good thing, no-one will believe it and they will be vilified. Once trust has been lost, there is no point in engaging. Any attempt to regain trust would be seen as an attempt at further manipulation.
We live in a world where people will look you in the eye and say with absolute certainty that the fact that "Don't be evil" was taken out of the Google code supports the idea they are bad actors.
Yet to this day, the last line of their code of conduct says...
"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Last updated July 16, 2026"
People will say that with such confidence that, If I say it is not true, they enthusiastically search it up, express surprise that the "don't be evil" is still there, and then say that it means nothing, because it's their actions that matter.
...and that is the truth. It _is_ their actions that matter. That's precisely what I push back on things that claim to know what their actions will be based upon some hidden state that they believe can be divined. The sense of certainty that they are malevolent, because they did a thing that was interpreted as a bad thing because they were assumed to be malevolent.
People, organisations, corporations, and governments can all do bad things. They can all do good things. We can judge their deeds better than we can judge their intentions.
Perhaps instead of "We don't believe you" people could just start with "I would like to believe you, show me how"
As you say, the distrust is backed up by evidence and by their own personal experience of the same promises getting trotted out time after time, generation after generation.
These people, these communities, have been promised these same things before (or things adjacent to them) and have seen them not deliver, or even make their situation worse.
This is especially true of the tax income and job generation elements. The estimates provided as part of the deal are utterly divorced from reality- people know it and refuse to take part in the kayfabe that surrounds it.
The other part is: if there really is so much money in these, it should be easy for the companies to produce an actually good deal. Everyone can tell (after all these experiences) what bullshit smells like, when the deals are full of tricks. Why try the tricks--property taxes that pay eventually, jobs that will show up eventually, promises that electric bills won't go up--when you could guarantee the results, and guarantee the town won't be left holding the bag?
Well of course it's because the companies think they don't have to give a good deal. That they can get away with it.
One wonders if at this point they would have saved money not trying to fuck people over to get what they wanted. I hope so. The ideal world has companies doing things the honest way because it's honest, but I'd settle for them doing it that way because they're economically incentivized to do so.
Corporate America is trapped in a race to the bottom - if you do the 'right' thing and say, don't negotiate hard for tax breaks from the host city or get some sort of predatory preferred pricing from the utilities providers to the detriment of local residents, 1) your shareholders might go after you for not maximising profit and 2) your competitors will do these things anyway and undercut you.
mostly unrelated but amusing: I keep getting fliers from Google fiber trying to get me to switch. Every one has this one bizarre line in it: "our customers have never had their rates go up!"---as if I am too stupid to realize that is not a promise. Now, I have no idea if that works on other people. Maybe enough other people are stupid and don't notice that that's not a promise that turns out to be good ad copy. But I am personally so put off by the disrespectful attempt at manipulation that I consider switching less, even though it might well save me money. It is significantly worse for them, as a sales tactic, than if they had written nothing there at all.
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> It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
I feel like this is projection. If you look at the list of top brands ranked by a variety of dimensions (trust, innovativeness, brand value, etc.) over the past multiple years, Big Tech companies regularly rank amongst the top 100.
The HN population, being mostly in the tech industry, is aware of all the shenanigans these companies pull and that has colored our views. But the rest of the general population... not so much. I mean, even Meta properties still rank highly despite all the things we know Meta has been doing pretty much since inception.
You raise an interesting point. If we look at Mag7: Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla: All of they are probably building data centers at a furious pace. (Honestly, I'm not sure if NVIDIA needs as many as the other six.) However, we do not see great opposition to their own data centers. Why? My guess: They are incredibly careful about how they plan data center expansion to reduce brand impact. Most of the opposition seems to be directed towards (1) pure play data center builders/operators who are mostly B2B and don't care as much about their brand retail reputation (2) pure AI/LLM companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. About (2): I wonder is the pushback deeper than the data center environmental impact and more about pushback against the unknown: "The Singularity with take all of our jobs.", etc.
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"We can't trust them" is the foundation of practically every conspiracy theory, though, from times immemorial. I remember people protesting against cell towers, and it was exactly what their arguments were built around: "We don't believe this thing won't fry our brains". It was the same before with electrical lines, and I guess steam power had its share too. Not telling a concerned citizen is obliged to trust everyone, marketing & propaganda were part of "underlying reality" for centuries at least. But frankly, you made it sound like it's a novel thing, a dark omen of evil AI times, or something.
The difference being that AI companies are destroying all sorts of stuff, and cellphone companies didn't - they just provided cellphones.
Society did decay because of cellphones but it wasn't anything to do with the cellphone companies. The towers always were exactly what the cellphone companies said they were.
The difference in attitude between cell phone conspiracy theories and data center conspiracy theories is almost entirely driven by the media reporting on them. The media (correctly) identifies people worried about cell phone radiation affecting their health as crackpots. But because the Anglosphere media establishment itself is threatened by the tech industry at large, it not only fails to report on anti-datacenter sentiment among uninformed people as similar crackpottery, it amplifies basically-inaccurate negative memes about data centers such as their water use.
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You raise a good point. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s. Every few months there were interviews and investigations on a local news programme about how using a mobile phone might cause brain cancer. Or living near above ground power lines caused all kinds of imaginary illnesses. From what I can see, most of those crazy people moved on to a new conspiracy theory. I cannot remember the last time that I saw any serious media coverage of either issue from my childhood.
This is an example of the same problem as the article; you're treating trust as entirely unrelated to reality. It can get out-of-step, but that's not the only possibility, and it's not the one we're facing here.
The problem with conspiracy theories is not that they're based on a lack of trust, but that they're not rational. Sometimes a lack of trust is perfectly rational.
Cell towers don't actually fry your brains. Steam powered trains don't move so fast you suffocate. However, the big tech CEOs are absolutely going to take your data and use it against you. They are going to build data centers that harm your community. The fear here is reasonable and evidenced.
This isn't unique to AI, but AI is the current iteration of the same problem. Sometimes people distrust outsiders because they're star-bellied sneetches, but sometimes they distrust them because they're the British empire. You can't treat all distrust as unreasoning.
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Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice -- can't get fooled again. - actual Dubya quote
An early form of anti-clipchimping. He would not say the words "shame on me".
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I have a property in NW Wisconsin. It's incredibly poor there - it seems like most people working age are on disability - the new form of welfare. Money is earned mostly in summer and hunting seasons. It's pretty depressing. Lots of alcohol problems. I hired someone to clear some trees and make lumber out of them once and he showed up for the job three months later. At least he showed up though. Weirdest thing - he never came back after the job to get paid. I end up often hiring contractors from 90 miles away to get good ones.
But a data center wouldn't help. It would raise electric prices and doesn't really employ people.
It's kind of like one industry that is in the area - there's a company that grows huge amounts of cranberries but its mostly automated. As far as I know only three people work on this huge site. They let the cranberries grow, flood the area when they're ready. The cranberries float to the top for robots to skim the surface and harvest them. The humans just move things around for the robots.
If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes surely it would help though right? In theory the taxes would go towards pro social uses.
Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".
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City taxes don't fix a broken economic flywheel. State taxes go to others and also don't fix it. You need a functional economy with jobs, income, spending and all that jazz. A small amount of taxes with no second order benefits is worth relatively little.
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A school and hospital would do that more than a data center tho. Look at Merced California, used to be a nowhere destination. They built a UC there and now it’s a place students, PhDs and MDs from around the world want to move to. If UC Merced were a data center it would attract no one, it would drain and pollute the lake, and Merced CA would still be a nowhere destination.
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Worth checking out
https://buildermuse.com/economy/every-state-offering-data-ce...
They often don't. In my area the locals gave them giant tax breaks in the hope of bringing in jobs that dont exist.
> If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes
if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle
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> Weirdest thing - he never came back after the job to get paid.
I believe you've met a Mike Garage:
https://x.com/japan_nobunaga/status/2083940637921943803
They don't always accept payment.
Exactly. Let's leave data centers to other nations. Let them run the intelligence and manufacturing, lets focus on getting (more) disability.
What do you believe is the link between chatboxes and manufacturing?
“Disability, the new form of welfare”? How old are you exactly?
A good portion of this movement is irrational and driven by viral media. Last week a coworker was talking about how unbearably loud data centers are. I asked them if our parking lot is loud. (There’s a decent sized server floor in our building and a bunch of cooling equipment in the parking lot.) They had never noticed the cooling system.
On the other hand, my city gave the local data centers big tax breaks to come here. In the last couple years my property taxes have increased significantly along with my electricity bill. It seems obvious that I’m subsidizing the local data center. There’s probably a couple dozen people who work there, so it’s not a realistic employment opportunity for me or anyone I know. I’m not anti-tech at all, but I wish the city hadn’t made the deal they did. Perhaps big tech could be less parasitic and contribute beneficially to society?
You know as well as I do that your server room is not the same as the cut-all-corners AI DCs getting built right now.
You never know, they might have a gas jet turbine in the parking lot blasting away 24/7
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There's a big psychological difference between the noise level in a transitory space like an office parking lot and the same noise level at a suburban home. Nobody wants their backyard, deck, or bedroom to sound like Eraserhead, even if it's subtle. (And some of the gas turbine ones are not subtle.)
Sure. But is your DC funded by AI insanity that will pay top $ to provision ASAP, which requires 100s (up to 800) turbines?
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Is it big tech's responsibility to somehow 'contribute beneficially'? Data center construction is not a welfare project.
As long as there is no corruption involved, I do not see what is wrong with big tech choosing a project site where the cost is minimal.
If there are many poor rural cities which compete for data center deals, this seems to me like an efficient free market.
If public opinion swings, will this not influence politicians, and force big tech to provide better benefits in these deals?
A free market is not one particular company getting a better deal on taxes than all the other businesses in the area. That’s the opposite actually.
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I found the below line to get particularly "hard":
> When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ safety and data centers.1 These were very different concerns from those I hear in San Francisco—a city with no kids and no data centers
> "The EMF reader is shakier, going haywire under the crackling power lines, then settling down a few steps away"
That kind of statement really bothers me. Is it measuring the magnetic fields or RF emissions? If it's RF, what frequency? If the EMF reader is picking up radio waves, I'm not exactly concerned. Visible light would be weird. X-rays would be very concerning. Is it just picking up the 50/60Hz power line? That's all around you in your house anyway. If you just don't like power lines, say that
Yeah that conspiracist nonsense should be left out when there are enough real problems like noise and electricity bills.
Data centers are fine if planned and built properly, which they never are in this AI shovel rush.
(Remember, in a shovel rush, sell casting machines)
How about the smell when she drives past a huge industrial sized dairy farm? (There are a lot of them in Wisconsin.) They smell awful, like roll up your windows awful.
Some of the reaction to data center build outs has become irrational but frankly I see it as a reflection of the arrogance of the billionaire tech elite. Voters were told:
- AI is going to take your jobs
- We need to build our data centers for this job stealing tool
- We need to build so quickly that there’s no time to do accurate assessments of what this will do to water or power supplies
Turns out people don’t like that. Who could have guessed? Anyone not living in a bubble.
"AI automating jobs", which is the narrative from tech bros to raise funding translates into "AI is going to take your job", for the average Joe. If you are a graphic designer that is now struggling to find work, why would you want a data centre in your town (or anywhere)?
Rejection (or fear) of AI translating into rejection of the physical infrastructure that supports it is perfectly reasonable.
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Do you have evidence? Because that claim doesn't pass the sniff test - why would people who have large amounts of money care about data centers?
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Is there? Do you have sourcing? Who are the well funded actors spending big against data centers?
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how many orders of magnitude less than the money flowing into building data centers? 6 or 7?
"Everyone that disagrees with me is a bot or paid propaganda". Sure, go tell yourself that. The money is clearly on the pro-AI camp, and you'd have to be delusional to think it isn't.
The power lines (seemingly everywhere) are pretty offensive on the eyes.
As a thought experiment why not just move the people who want them to those neighbourhoods and move the people who don't where the people who do live. I wonder how many would actually take that deal..
I suspect they wouldn't
It's an elite project, being forced on us without having any choice. It is worsening inflation. It is increasing inequality. It is threatening careers. It has cheapened human creativity. Just look at how the elite of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and politics are coalescing to absurd lengths to fund and build these things. Why wouldn't you be suspicious...
Inflation and inequality are driven by the money printer far more than AI. The money printer is also driving AI, because there's far more supply of money than sensible investments to put it in.
Common citizens aren't the only ones who prefer not to live near these unsightly noise-and-pollution centers. Look at the satellite views around tech oligarchs' homes, and you won't see any data centers anywhere near those lavish estates. Let them build it in their own backyard.
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That's a bit racist isn't it?
No, it was as a comment about the Chinese government, not something inherent in the Chinese race
what’s racist ? are you okay ?
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Solid article. Outlines well why no one wants these things. I hope it helps more communities fight these and ensure almost none get built
I hope it also helps investors and hyperscalers to understand the risk of losing the trust of the public.
The majority of people opposed AC current, cars, steam engines, rail tracks, airplanes, computers, the internet, and so on. There was always irrational fear present with new tech advances. People opposing data centers will not look any less foolish than those who opposed AC current.
I don't think the people who opposed those things look foolish even today. Most of those things, in their early days, were implemented haphazardly and with an incredible lack of regulatory oversight, and the reason they were not quite as disastrous as they could have been is that people opposed them.
And people opposing data centers today who are opposing unfettered data center creations will not look any *more* foolish than those who opposed the things you cite.
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There were even some complete and utter fools who said Asbestos wasnt all that.
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I need evidence for all of these please.
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People in UK opposed train tracks in steam engine days, saying that the train engine sound scares their horses and cattle. Ofcourse data centers are far worse. But it is amusing to see how humanity continues to oppose tech and the tech buldozes anyway, like a evil monster.
How are they "far worse"? Steam trains are noisy, polluting, require tons of coal, kill animals and people in their way, and crash fairly regularly (when built with 1800s technology).
A data center is a big grey box that sits there humming quietly, and that's it. They do require power and lots of it, but unlikely steam engines they'll happily use solar, nuclear or anything else.
Noise pollution is a real issue, even for data centers that is "humming quietly". Same for its energy consumption. Water cooling is another issue, given that lots of the steam a data center generates can rain down in places that wont make the water re-join the water lifecycle easily.
You're comparing steam trains in practice to datacentres in theory. To give one example: the US federal government is suspending all sorts of environmental regulations relating to pollution, just for datacentres: why would they do that if datacentres ran on clean solar or nuclear?
I get why people wouldn't want (steam) trains in their proverbial back yard just as much as they wouldn't want datacenters. Trains may be a net benefit for a region's mobility and economy, but that doesn't undo the local disruption to people's environments. (I'm unconvinced datacenters have that impact on a region, it generates some jobs at best but most of those will be secondary/tertiary jobs. Primary jobs will be the people doing daily work in and around the site like security and maintenance, but the higher paid specialist work will be flown in or done remotely)
They tend to use coal and natural gas, instead, often in especially dirty forms. The fact that they can use solar doesn’t mean they do.
Data centers are quite loud.
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“Humming quietly”? Really? Humming, yeah, sure, but ask the people living next door how quiet they are.
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it's a dumb comparison and you're doubling down on it
They also need gargantuan amounts of fresh water. And it's anything but a quiet humming.
96db is quiet?
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-n...
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> like a evil monster.
I tend to like not fearing starvation every year, not fearing freezing to death every year and not having the vast majority of my kids die. Industrialization led to all that.
Post-industrialization, AI-fication, Human Replacement (whatever it ought to be called) could take that all away.
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I didn't realize we were going to freeze to death if there weren't chatboxes everywhere.
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>But it is amusing to see how humanity continues to oppose tech and the tech buldozes anyway, like a evil monster.
So you're saying the UK should never have built a railway system? It sounds like tech is right.
The benefits of the railway system should've been distributed a hell of a lot more evenly and it should have been blocked until that happened, yes.
I disagree with the “evil monster” part, but thanks for sharing that example. I’ll probably use it the opposite way in meetings .. people were deeply skeptical of railways too, yet they ended up transforming society for the better.
Only after a lot of mega companies ruined a lot of people's lives and then went bankrupt.
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It's not about opposing data centers, it's about opposing them close to where you live.
There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact: - insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away - virtually no jobs brought to the place, besides some construction work early on - massive drain of local resources - massive eye sore
Like, I'm not against data centers per se, but you tell me they building one few miles from my house, I'm listing it the day I hear it and escaping as far as I can.
> There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact: - insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away
Can you share a link or two to this? Hearing a data center from miles away sounds suspicious.
I'm fairly sure that most aren't any louder than other facilities of similar size. It's comes down to their cooling infrastructure and they vary widely.
It sounds more like humanity opposes noise pollution?
It's almost like all of that is true and early train companies didn't even bring enough value to the area to offset all of that?
Trains still do that today. They cut a locality in half with only certain crossing points being allowed. But at least enough people ride the train they can feel it's worthwhile.
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