YHK - yet another hacker news clone

So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it.

"Yet you participate in society, curious! I'm very intelligent."

One of the nice things about living in a rich country is the ability to externalise certain costs.

I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit?

The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!

The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that.

Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and petulance.

Common pattern:

"I'm against A."

"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."

"I don't care!"

They did not. They rejected the billionaire tax in California. A bunch of temporarily embarrassed billionaires in California protected the rich

Unless you're really ideology driven there's very few things that can be built around your neighbourhood (especially in a suburb) that will make it more valuable or pleasant to live. NIMBY is just not wanting to lose things.

Data centres have no real reason to be built in anyone's backyard. To prove it I'll just say that some of the guys that want to put it in your backyard, also ponder putting it in space.

Forgive my ignorance, but how would the current data center proposals "economically benefit their children"? It seems like a local land concession that would benefit a national economy, but hardly do anything long-term for the locality where the data center is built (maybe ~100 jobs and some property taxes).

The high-level solution, though, is to stop concentrating housing and all the supporting infrastructure. NIMBY is a positive force in that regard.

The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.

BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.

Yes, this is the trillion dollar question

Pretty much. Mushroom farms smell like shit when the wind turns. Even just normal farms smell like manure at various times of the year. Amazon fulfillment centres are hideous and create a lot of traffic in the surrounding area. There's a reason building industry near residential in the SimCity series causes residential property values to drop.

I lived near mega diaries and oil fields growing up. Depending on the wind you either smelled manure or sulfur. People used to say "smells like money" because ag and oil were the source of jobs in the area.

I also believe they’re inevitable. Capital will find places without opposition and build them. There are thousands of jurisdictions in the US and capital usually wins.

I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.

We have so much vacant industrial land in the rust belt (so-called "brownfields"), with good access and utility infrastructure, why not build the data centers there? Why do they need to go on farmland in the countryside?

We had a cake/chocolate factory near my town growing up, on some windy days it smelled really nice.

Good. That's how America's free market is supposed to work.

Why do you say that? TARP was extremely unpopular yet still happened.

Never underestimate the willingness of politicans to vote for pork.

Not at all. The reasonable democrats will be forced to clean this mess (and Iran) while spending their newly found political capital and pissing off their base.

AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.

And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.

Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.

thats called free market capitalism...

> If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.

That's how things should work. Bailouts are socialism for corporations.

I don't think data centers are directly the issue either, but a proxy for feelings about the LLM era in general.

FUD spread from competing nation states is where it all originated from. Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began. If you live in a medium to large city goto google maps and search for "datacenter" in your town, i bet you live within 5 miles of one that you've never even noticed before.

There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

I haven't seen a broad analysis, but every specific one I've looked into accounted for your concern and defined some sort of minimum size or power draw.

They never do that in the "first round". Usually you gotta wait for a compliance industry to spring up and then they inevitably lobby for the definition of people who need to pay the compliance industry to get watered down. It's just the natural incentive creep of the system.

I would be surprised if a rack of servers in an office closet could realistically draw 25 megawatts of energy, which is generally the cutoff that these local ordinances use to define a "data center". Keeping in mind that the cost of commercial electricity alone for powering even a 1 megawatt data center continuously for 1 month would have to be at least 100,000 dollars, right?

Laws are public, you are welcome to go read them. All of the ones I've read define it based on [x] megawatt of compute or similar. None of them are banning a rack of servers in a closet.

In Ohio: 25 megawatts. $2 million/month in electricity, call it $750m of hardware, plus the building.

This is not going to affect small businesses.

I think you mean resent?

And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.

What ownership model are you referring to that is tech-specific and why is it in quotes?

"No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”

I think that as an industry, we'll have to make the case persuasively that the datacenters won't hurt quality of life for nearby residents, that they'll have a positive influence on the local economy, and that even more broadly that the benefit from AI is shared and not captured by small group of the ultra wealthy.

That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.

How is the profitability of the big AI companies looking? How is their ability to service their debt shaping up?

> somewhere else (tm)

Also known as China, future world superpower. They have enough political continuity to formulate a strategy at national scale and execute on it.

It's crazy how they just keep winning while the US and democracies the world over keep shooting themselves in the foot.

> while they get the gains

The gains continue to flow into the US... For now. I wonder how long that'll last.

>My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?

I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.

> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?

The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.

Yes. And are not exempted from existing pollution regulations.

data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.

Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?

The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.

If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.

> The county is gaining water from this

All farming should be stopped immediately and converted to data centres, then we’ll have unlimited water!

How are they generating this electricity without competing for resources generally?

There is also the increase in cost of borrowing for everyone. Going this fast is just insane.

It doesn't matter what their reasons are. It's their community

Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls

Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.

And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.

"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.

Why not just build the data center right on Oleary's land, right next to his mansion? He'll create jobs there too.

> They're generating their own electricity

Yeah, from natgas right? Or maybe diesel generators? Or are they building one of the practically nonexistent green energy data centers?

It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.

Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.

Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.

These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.

There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...

The natural gas they are burning is being bought from the market and that will more than likely lead to increased natural gas costs.

"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"

How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.

In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.

I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.

My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)

ps. Have never used tiktok

Did you research the reasons in favor building it with the same rigor? What was the outcome?

The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers

It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.

And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.

It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...

It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.

I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"

Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

So the farm is no longer there? As in it is using zero water right now?

> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Serious doubt. They will use whichever is cheaper, and that's going to be the grid.

People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

How much?

> I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here.

i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm

It’s might create a massive localized heat problem https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.

>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?

Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.

A farm produces food that people can eat. A data center runs AI that takes people's jobs and produces... vibe coded websites that look like trash.

You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for

You live in Snowville?

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.

Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.

The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.

I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.

In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.

I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.

In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.

Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?

You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.

Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".

Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?

Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers: * Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc). * Massive economic destabilization and disruption * Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility * Wars and international conflict * Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry * Takeover by governments, use by threat actors * A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.

People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.

The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation

There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities

Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.

WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."

And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.

Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.

All it takes is for one state to grant AI narrowly-scoped medical licensing to treat various things human doctors are allowed to treat telephonically.

They won't, because we'll still have no money to pay for healthcare as a result of AI taking our jobs. To the contrary, right now the rational choice is to not allow these AI farms to be installed so that many of us (this is not only about the US) still have access to a decent lifestyle (including decent health, that is).

Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...

I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.

Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of these moneys have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.

This is probably a health reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.

It's local problem., but it's not just a local problem.

Those will likely create lots of jobs. Local industry is good.

Mostly yes. Everyone would also prefer that steel mills semiconductor fabs get built somewhere else, where they personally don't have to deal with any of the externalities.

> Politician promised "no data centers". District was unsuitable for data centers anyway.

On the bright side, here's a politician who can keep their promise.

Data centers in China, more likely