No Data Centers in My Backyard

> >"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"

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.

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.

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.

    > the current leaders of the tech world do not have the best interests of people in mind.

An early form of anti-clipchimping. He would not say the words "shame on me".

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.

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.

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.

> If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes

if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle

What do you believe is the link between chatboxes and manufacturing?

You never know, they might have a gas jet turbine in the parking lot blasting away 24/7

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.

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?

Is there? Do you have sourcing? Who are the well funded actors spending big against data centers?

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.

No, it was as a comment about the Chinese government, not something inherent in the Chinese race

what’s racist ? are you okay ?

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.

There were even some complete and utter fools who said Asbestos wasnt all that.

I need evidence for all of these please.

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)

Data centers are quite loud.

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.

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?

“Humming quietly”? Really? Humming, yeah, sure, but ask the people living next door how quiet they are.

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...

Post-industrialization, AI-fication, Human Replacement (whatever it ought to be called) could take that all away.

I didn't realize we were going to freeze to death if there weren't chatboxes everywhere.

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.

Only after a lot of mega companies ruined a lot of people's lives and then went bankrupt.

> 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.