I'm honestly surprised why local governments are so eager to make datacenter deals in the first place. I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region. So if the voters don't want it, that feels like their prerogative.

I don't know if it's the elected officials conflating data centers with the region becoming a bustling tech hub, rather than just a way for a Bay Area company to capitalize on cheap electricity... or if it's kickbacks.

> it doesn't generate any real tax revenue

This is a choice the local government can make. You can read Loudon County's (us-east-1 + everything else) explaining what it does with the data center revenue it gets https://www.loudoun.gov/6188/Data-Centers-in-Loudoun-County.

> it increases electricity costs for the region

Also a choice the local government can make! I don't know about this specific case but I suspect we'll see local governments get more sophisticated when negotiating with tech companies.

> and it increases electricity costs for the region

This doesn't need to be true. It would be both possible and reasonable to mandate subsidy by the datacenter as part of any deal so that costs don't go up for anyone else.

Technically, it creates construction revenue and jobs. If you’re a municipality with FOMO heading into a job-collapse recession and someone offers you jobs on a silver platter, you might get fired from the city council for refusing it. So it’s particularly interesting to see that citizens would rather refuse datacenters than gain from them. (I certainly agree.)

Municipalities, at least in some states, can be sued for refusing development that meets existing regulation and zoning

A few steak dinners go a long way.

I think that they hear "$6 billion datacenter" and think that the town's economy is getting $6 billion in jobs rather than some foreign computer hardware company is getting $6B for computers that are housed in their town.

Property tax and (in some cases) utility taxes are deeply attractive, especially in places with large industrial-zoned swaths of land nobody is really interested in.

> I'm pro-progress

I think everyone is, by definition.

It's the second thing

Data centers are high-dollar projects that sound great and officials are able to look like they're doing things to increase revenues, generate jobs, create infrastructure and put the community on the forefront of high-tech. Altogether, those are commendable increases, but the devil is in the details, in that all of those things do not occur at once and the costs associated with have a much longer payoff timeline.

Homeowner property tax would be 37% higher in Loudon County if not for all the datacenters. DCs are a great subsidy for the county coffers.

> increases electricity costs for the region

This is really the only legitimate complaint that has any basis in reality.

But "region" is doing a lot of work here. This is typically a multi-state sized region. There are local congestion charges in some places, but overall it doesn't matter a whole lot to your electric bill if a large consumer goes in 200 miles away or across the road from you.

If it goes in across the road your local community gets the benefit of having about the least obnoxious industrial use of land possible. After construction there is very little truck traffic (e.g. much less wear and tear on local roads than a trucking terminal or manufacturing plant), and effectively is a giant office building in terms of impact on it's surroundings. In fact, until recently most of the datacenters were built in suburban office and light industrial parks and no one was the wiser.

There are legitimate complaints to be made about "datacenters" that also co-locate a natural gas or diesel power plant. But those complaints are towards building a power plant across the street, not a datacenter.

It's effectively as "free" of a tax base as you can get, assuming you don't negotiate stupid local tax abatements - which I suppose is a large caveat. Those should be simply outright illegal for everyone though, I don't see that as a datacenter specific thing. It also does effectively employ a few dozen to few hundred local tradesmen through the lifecycle of such a facility - since at these scales there is constant electric and plumbing work to be done. Usually the highest paid and highly skilled of such type of work. Many (most?) places are even using union labor for these bits.

The power problem exists broadly though. We spent a few generations not building out anything of material size and we are reaping what we have sewn. It was coming for us either way - datacenter AI bubble just brought it forward a some odd number of years. Just look at how hard it is to get a wind farm project off the ground due to NIMBY - both for the wind farm itself, and the 200 mile transmission line you might need to build to the closest major load centers. Effectively impossible.