Comment by stryan
18 hours ago
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .
> when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa.
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
> So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
My community tried that. They were coerced into a tax break instead.
https://www.wemu.org/wemu-news/2026-07-18/saline-township-re...
They do pay, that's why these towns are doing all these shady things to minimize public input.
The problem is that the towns generally want to spend the money on new stuff rather than give the money back in tax cuts.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
> Noise, pollution
Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines.
Obviously you have to actually do it that way, but that's the point -- the focus of noise and pollution concerns should be directed towards how power is being generated.
> water usage / contamination
Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
> energy costs
Energy costs are supply and demand. The econ 101 explanation is generally pretty accurate for supply -- if there isn't enough supply then prices go up. This is why NIMBYs screw everyone (including themselves). If you can't build more of something then you have to pay more for whatever already exists.
Demand is more complicated. Econ 101 usually applies in the immediate term, higher prices don't increase supply instantaneously so an immediate increase in demand tends to create an immediate increase in price. But then you can increase supply, and what does that do?
You now have higher volume, more economies of scale, more units to amortize fixed costs over. The ultimate effect of an increase in demand is usually a reduction in the unit price. The exceptions are the things where supply is highly inelastic, like land (as opposed to housing units), which is not the case with power generation.
Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators are preventing supply from increasing. In which case you should be focused on fixing that.
2 replies →
You can't make them pay. And even if you could, real people wouldn't see the revenue.
It's far cheaper to buy local politicians.
This seems naive. You are missing the point. If you don't offer tax incentives, then you don't get data centers (or other important industrial facilities). The internal United States market competition to attract these projects is intense. If you look at when a major foreign auto manuf wants to build a new plant in the US, there is a line of communities hat-in-hand offering all kinds of tax rebates and cheap loans.
I looked up the reason why Loudoun County has so many data centers: (1) favorable zoning laws passed in year 2000 and (2) sales tax break specific to data centers.
Consider that the stance now is banning data centers. That's the context of the discussion.
The county's other option is to simply price data centers. Yes, that means they might not win the data center. If the data center can get better terms elsewhere, they do that. If the town doesn't want to concede on price, then fine.
People seem to be mad that data centers show up with less perceived value to the community than they want, so why would they care if the data center builds elsewhere because they don't agree to their price? The position strictly Pareto dominates the ban stance: at worst, they get no data center (same as ban), at best, they get a bunch of tax money.
Please educate me on how I'm "missing the point" because of how "naive" I am!
> What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers. Just make them pay!
What kind of question is that? Communities that don't want them?
You think money can fix and buy everything?
Besides, they pay already.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Well maybe if you were in community with the people protesting them you'd understand their perspective.
They don't pay as much. They get their electricity at industrial bulk rates while we pay the residential rate. Their demands require more power lines to be run, but those costs are spread out and blended with consumers. It's a legal form of stealing.
Because people don't like living next to them. They're loud, they're large and monotonous, they don't provide many jobs after construction, they use a lot electricity and decent amount of water, and the ones that rely on fossil fuels pollute.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
https://www.loudoun.gov/faq.aspx?TID=241
Loudoun County is a very rich part of NOVA and was able to fight for those concessions, as well as being in a very desirable part of the country for those DC's to built in (close to major infrastructure but still undeveloped at the time) so they had a better position to argue from.
Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, while Loundoun County gets the tax benefits the whole area is affected by the DC's power consumption due to the regional power grid and shared infrastructure (i.e. the Potomoc) so part of my already high power bills was due to the data centers there and I got minimal benefits.
Yes. See my other comment about how Oregon was able to solve the power problem. The residents of Oregon will be paying LOWER prices than before the data centers.
The data center problem seems to be merely a government corruption problem. Which is a problem, of course, but not limited to data centers.
1 reply →
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Everyone would be singing their praises.
Oregon just passed a law saying data centers will pay more for electricity than normal people, and the math says that everyone's rates will be going down.
So, again, I think it depends on whether you live in a red or blue state.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/04/data-centers-utility-...
that seems odd, do other industries pay a higher rate for electricity or is this specifically targeting data centers?
1 reply →
>Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
demand goes up + supply remains steady = price goes up.
Why should supply stay steady?
You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
Putting up everyone’s prices is a hard impact on a community.
4 replies →
Also infrastructure costs might be billed differently between industrial vs retail.
(And the marginal cost on infrastructure isn't necessarily paid be the people increasing the demand)
In the short term (assuming no point fixes help soften the shock).
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.