Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots.

I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.

    US usage stat [0]:            82    gal/ day  /person
    Days to years:          ~ 30,000    gal/ year /person
    To metric:              ~   ~113.4  m^3/ year /person

> I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs...

50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.

I wonder if this will incentivize pushing compute back toward the user instead of in big centralized facilities, sonething like a repeat of the PC revolution.

Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?

Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?

Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.

We've "imported" this concern to the UK too, largely driven by the same issues seemingly whipped up by US lack of regulation much more than local examples (that's not to say there have been no cases of bad buildouts here).

Many of the people now extremely opposed to data centres seem to believe the UK didn't have any data centres recently, never mind that you can pass by data centres in e.g. London Docklands and mistake it for an office building. In some cases they are in a subset of floors of office buildings.

I'm all for regulating them so they need to account for externalities, but the blind opposition to them is frustrating, not least because it means there's no pressure to deal with the actual regulatory gaps since the focus ends up being on trying to block projects.

> this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over

I wonder if these "classic projects" have been morphing into jet engine projects as energy use vs energy available have changed.

personally datacenters have affected you and me: ssds, hard disks and memory are super expensive; electricity costs have gone up

Maybe, but "this would probably have been fine five years ago" is not a very reassuring standard. The physical impact matters more than whether the racks are running email servers or training models.

Is there a need? Or a want?

I think this general situation has been on peoples' minds since Erin Bronkovich. Gosh that movie came out 26 years ago.

> There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub

Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).

Even the traditional DC companies are going all-in on AI.

"Won't somebody think of the poor non-AI datacenters?"

... said nobody, until now

Given that after the advent of virtualization we had a glut of datacenter space, and then the crypto bros started buying them up to mine: do we actually need more datacenters? Or do we just need regulators to say things like: mining crypto to facilitate money laundering and ransomware isn’t welcome here?

> and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis

By bringing jobs to a struggling city in their industrial district?

> That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters

I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.

I work in commercial real and even I'm going to go NIMBY mode on this lol. This property shares a large boundary to the zoo and I have a very hard time believing you won't cause an impact (noise pollution eg) to the animals next door.

Is there any evidence anywhere of a totally sound proof, unintrusive mega data center? I have not seen anything.

Messing with the zoo was a really bad idea - it is extremely popular, has higher attendance than professional sports in our market, and Nashville is full of celebrities who immediately hit their socials to condemn it.

There is lots of land outside the city but then you can't piggyback on infrastructure so it is more expensive. That's my primary objection - if this is so important why not spend the money to put it somewhere it is likely to have less of an impact on your neighbors?

> Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels?

Can they break those promises easily?

Sure, you can sue, but while those suits move through courts, everyone else suffers.

This is more a harbinger of what is about to happen all over the country. So the specifics matter less than it marking the political ascendancy of the backlash to AI / data centers / big tech / billionaires...

One of the guys leading the effort is active on threads (probably twitter too). He has no interest in negotiating. He is gloating over his win hardcore and has very absolutist views when it comes to datacenters

If the city thinks data centers are incompatible with certain areas, it should encode that through zoning, permitting, utility pricing, noise limits, etc.

Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.

Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.

I spent most of my IBEW apprenticeship working in data centers of all sizes (5-300,000 sqft), and micro co-location facilities (like DCb's) are entirely different from the likes of the AWSes and cryptomining operations of this world (250,000sqft+).

Happy for the zoo exhibits/animals, but this particular co-lo wasn't even among the egregious data center owners.

----

My recommendation to data center planners: small cities have cheaper land, and lots of love/power/cronyism. You may get further by buddying up with the smaller fishes/communities.

This sounds like one of those cases where the opposition may be right about the project and still wrong about the mechanism

Agreed and disagreed. It is a terrible precedent for sure. On the other hand, government inaction, usually hiding behind arcane codes, process, and blame circles gets really frustrating. In that world, they'd still be waiting on a court date(if even) when the data center cuts its ribbon.

It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.

Nashville politics operate in an extremely narrow window.

The local government has a degree of autonomy, but there are unspoken checks on it by a generally hostile state government. Nashville is represented by Democrats while the state is controlled by Republicans. There is an implicit threat that if the city fails to pursue the state's objectives the state will punish it.

Recently the city angered the state because it refused to hold the Republican convention. The state retaliated by passing a law to shrink the Nashville city council and another to take control of its airport. The state also took control of the Nashville tourism board that has a slush fund paid for by city taxes.

There is a direct line between state reps and local politicians. So for example when state lobbyists were angered at the loss of parking due to a bike lane they called up a council member to have the lane removed.

Which is all to say that the stadium deal was ordered by the state and not something the city had a real say in.

If the datacenter people go and cozy up to the governor or legislators the state will lean on the city again and they will ram it through as well.

Amazing that the new stadium has less capacity too

Stadiums actually provide utility to the local community

You can't think of a single new development in the situation?

Sorry to be snide - you can certainly make an argument that the demands of AI should not affect public perception of data centers, but you should simply make that argument, rather than mysteriously omitting any reference to the issue.

> The current climate around seems very sudden.

Is it?

Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.

AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.

Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.

Way better than all the other uses though.

Right, it's supposed to be used to take people's homes. /s

> high-pitched whine.

Does it have to?

I meant, it is a very common problem with lots of complain. I bet modern electronic can do it much less noise.

Does HN know something in this area?

It is probably not that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 posted yesterday explains it well.

You don't need a conspiracy theory. All these data centers were going up in rural/near rural areas that voted for this, but then the data centers made everyone else's electric bills go up.

I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.

While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power

The value prop for the crazy sounding idea of putting GPUs into orbit.

They did it because people didn't want a data center next to the zoo. There was a huge backlash against it, and the locals are very happy that they were listened to, I can promise you. No conspiracy theory necessary.

Don’t forget the horrible water usage of data centers! But don’t ask me how much water animal agriculture uses.

People love to pretend to care about animals.

Prison is where we put people who have broken laws. A zoo is primarily where we put animals who are incapable of surviving in the wild.

It is also a place where the next generation can learn the wonder and beauty of nature.

They also tend to work closely with conservation efforts worldwide.

So... yeahhh, no. Not at all the same.

Why would the data center operators pay extra taxes to your city when they can just build them somewhere else that gives them a tax break instead?

This isn't true?

San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee

> [T]he nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government.

This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”

But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.

>this isn't a city or a county

Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either

Yes, Nashville has a huge number of council members, and it's much better that way. I moved from there to Seattle, and there's 9 council members (7 districts + 2 city-wide) here so we share a representative with a huge area (six times the people and two and a half times the land) and our local concerns have no voice.

The implication being that people should like data centers more than sports stadiums...? I don't understand.

People like their local sports.

DC's are being used as a proxy for power and wealth disparity. Fix that. Have an actual measurable plan for general prosperity (health care, QoL, housing, you name it) and the data centers won't be a concern

Backlash is just a natural consequence in a democratic society to the absolute accelerationist mindset that AI development has taken since 2022. Actions meet consequences. I mean it wasn't so long ago they were talking about wiping out all white collar work and consigning most the country to the permanent underclass. If you look at how the rest of the economy has been starved of capital to fund all this and how its contributed to inflation and job insecurity, it doesn't really take a foreign actor to spark a massive backlash.

Aesthetics are important. Everyone enjoys looking at a golf course, even non-golfers. Nobody wants to look at a datacenter.

My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar thing for our distribution hub, it’s south of downtown kind of in the outskirts and in an economically struggling area. Same for industrial areas, it’s usually something that’s zoned to a particular area so residential neighborhoods aren’t really affected. It’s not land where the community may benefit more by literally anything else (sometimes even a Walmart is better than a datacenter). I assume that’s where this is all headed, cities need to roll out their long term vision of where datacenters fit into their city, if at all. Until then, it’s all these small battles and the information used by opponents doesn’t really matter. If enough people don’t want it, it should probably go somewhere else. This is not serving any community benefit so I don’t see any reason why it has to exist where the developers want it to.

Expecting rational opposition is actually irrational. They just don’t want it. The why is varied and probably based more on emotion than anything else.

The biggest externality is the electrical usage. IDK why they keep mentioning water. The AI DCs are driving huge loads to grids, and all ratepayers are being asked to pay for that. IMO if they built a solar + battery farm on grid, paid by AI DCs, there would be no significant hurdles.

A stockyard doesn't consume into the gigawatts of power.

There is not a concerted effort to build thousand upon thousands of stockyards across the globe.

Stockyards wont increase the planets reliance of oil, since green technologies don't scale that fast. Same planet that feeling the effect of climate change quite clearly.

All for close to zero upside for the surrounding community. At least the stockyard would have given you cheaper meat. What are data centers going to give? Discount tokens?

That's why your stockyard does not have the same pushback.

AI datacenters have very real negative effects on the communities they are located in like noise pollution and increased power prices. If you manage to defeat the water reason then people will just start using some other reason.

Yes, we should be looking into the wasteful water use in golf courses too.

> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc

This sounds like a pretty good argument against golf courses. Not sure why you think this comparison put the water consumption of DCs into perspective, to me it just puts the water consumption of golf courses into perspective.

As the xAI debacle in Memphis showed, once construction begins the locality may lose the ability to enforce existing laws around e.g. noise, pollution, etc. that normally serve to contain negative externalities. (This is a side effect of the rule that people who are rich enough are immune from laws.)

Since more precision remedies are off the table, all that's left are gross mechanisms like bans and eminent domain.

Nobody sane would accede to admitting a new community member who is a priori immune to local laws.

> water usage despite being less than golf courses, etc

Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.

Data center water usage varies heavily by design and climate. Most data center providers are not openly publishing water usage, and when they do publish metrics they hide behind derived metrics like WUE. So I don't blame the opponents for any "hysteria".

When we look at data we actually have [0], we can see for example AWS data centers in Oregon consumed 284,000,000 gallons of water in 2024. By their own estimate 100% of that water is typically consumed in the summer months of June, July, August, and Sept. These are also the months that farms use the most irrigation, lawns use the most, etc. Also, keep in mind that Eastern Oregon has ideal weather for evaporative cooling (specifically low humidity). Evap cooling is used for data centers in more humid parts of the country/world and can be significantly less water efficient.

The average Oregon resident uses 80 gallons of water per day, or 29,200 gallons of water annually. And if you calculate it out In 2024, AWS in Oregon used water equivalent to 9726 residents' annual usage. Is that a lot? What if you add all the other data center operators in the area? I don't know. Is they causing unrealistic pressure on aquifiers and the Columbia River watershed? I don't know either. Is the trade off of water consumption for data centers worth it? I'm not really sure how to answer these questions, but I think it starts with data center operators and their utilities being more open about their usage. Today data center operators like to compare their newest DC designs to golf courses and household use and it's not showing the full story.

[0] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/get-involved/Documents/2026-03...

I mean.... I don't know about where you live but where I am in the North East, electric prices have near doubled in last few years... the people are blaming AI and data centers for this, I'm sure it's not 100% the culprit but the people are looking for someone to blame and some sense that they can control it. Local zoning and municipal ordinance are one of the few ways small folk can assert power.

The public discourse for any sufficiently technical topic sounds misinformed to anyone who understands the topic well.

However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.

Perhaps you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180901 on here yesterday?

There is basically zero truth about the water use propaganda. Liquid cooling is closed-cycle, just like in a car.

Conversely, the pro-data center camp seems so deeply misled about water usage. 90% of current existing data centers are indeed open loop and use evaporative cooling which use SIGNIFICANTLY more water per acre than even farmland or golf courses. Unlike residential use, where 80% of the water is reclaimed, open loop data centers allow almost all the water to evaporate. And unlike agricultural use which is dispersed over a wide area, data centers draw water from a single pipe, usually drawing from municipal sources. Golf courses usually use recycled, grey, or non-potable water while data centers need really pure water

The water grievances are absolutely valid and so many folks here seem to have drunk the industry koolaid on it.

Closed loop systems aren't exactly green either. That water has to be pumped with anti-corrosives, anti-fungals, non-stick chemicals, etc. Eventually it turns into a toxic sludge that has to be bled about once a month. They also require significantly more electricity than open loop facilities.

Please do provide your sources on the golf course stat you quoted.

my state power commission just passed a plan to build out 9.5 gigawatts of daily production that will be purely generated by gas turbines [1]. this is at the behest of paid lobbyists for the energy sector and commissioners who, according to open records, have received upwards of six figures from the energy company that is granted a monopoly over our energy here [2]

this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers

if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly

regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much

[1](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/georgia-power...) [2](https://energyandpolicy.org/georgia-psc-incumbents-majority-...) [3](https://rmi.org/resources/you-might-be-paying-for-a-worthles...)

Nonsensical issues go viral all the time without any conspiracy behind them

I don't understand the water usage fears. I'm much more concerned with electricity usage.

1. A concern is not invalid merely because something else is worse. 2. Leaping to influence by foreign state is non sequitur. What evidence have you observed for that? How do I know you haven't been sent by the corporate tech elites? 3. Focussing on water strawmans the other arguments against data center imho.

I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.

With patience, love and a bit of humor. X

[dead]

[flagged]

Perhaps, just maybe, all the price hikes in electricity, city provided subsidies without any public meetings, and shady dealings (NDAs, encouraging city officials to arrest people commenting against the dcs, and so on) make people wary?

Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?

Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?

Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?

"can only be good" - you can't imagine ways in which they at least could be bad?

Depends on who you’re talking about. How does the cost benefit analysis work out for someone while lives within a mile of a datacenter, owns no shares in the company, and pays rate fees for their utilities and will have to pay for maintenance for the increased load capacity as well as higher spot prices? If you view America as a cohesive unit I’d agree with you, but I don’t think these people are necessarily acting irrationally if you view their personal circumstance. It’s up to the building company to sweeten the deal and provide an incentive for the locals to add it. Based on the contracts I’ve read from many of these datacenters it seems more like they’re buying the pockets of corrupt politicians and developers in areas with high political inequality while conferring very little benefit to the people who deal with the externalized cost.

I take it that you'll be pleased when a data center is proposed to be built behind your house then yes?

I remember when building more fiber could only be good. An awful lot of it sits in the ground lost, never used because it was the wrong type or in the wrong spots, or otherwise pointless waste.

Further, electicity price hikes seems like a bad prospect when inflation is already rampant. If you want a datacenter, offer your house for the space instead.

beginning? the end of empire became obvious with the election of trump, but probably started with missteps in the 80s

Good for the construction companies, the billion dollar corporations, and the whole 4 people needed to run each one.

Not once instance of these datacenters has proven to be beneficial for the communities and economies they're located in.

That's not as great example as you think it is.

Those would be great epistemics

It's a religious belief that we're going to invent a machine god and our machine god will fight china's machine god.

Go ahead and go live next to one then and show us how it's nothing but propaganda.

Quite convenient how the same people trying to run roughshod over the others to get these bubble mania mausoleums built NEVER live near them but are HAPPY to make others who can't afford a second home live next to them.

>the American way of life our child’s will inherit is going to mean something very different than what it meant for us.

I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821

I don't understand how the abundance of AI datacenters translates into wellbeing of common folk. Right now AI is a net negative for the people.

Regardless of a datacenter being for AI or not, NIMBY applies to everyone. I look forward to these totally probable datacenters in space.