> We kind of need them, though arguably many of the ones being built now are motivated by foolish AI bubble incentives.

I think the purpose is important. People understand the need for power stations or garbage dumps or waste treatment plants. However:

- Those are clearly understood to be a negative for the immediate environment. No one wants to live next to a garbage dump.

- They are just as clearly understood to be a benefit or even necessity for overall society, including the people having to live close by: Everyone wants pickup and processing of their garbage working smoothly.

With AI datacenters, the situation is weirdly turned on its head:

- The overall necessity of AI is still deeply questionable. Businesses and governments are pushing it and yes, there are a lot of users, but overall sentiment of the population seems to be ambivalent to strongly negative. There is everything from warnings of addiction and AI psychosis to AI simply destroying most peoples' livelihood. So there is no "greater cause" for which someone should tolerate an AI datacenter in their neighborhood, the way they might tolerate a wind turbine.

- To make up for this, AI proponents seem to try and conjure up some ostensible direct benefits the data center (and not the AI wave in general) would have for the neighborhood, like jobs or followup businesses. It increasingly gets clear that this is just a ruse, maybe an exploitation of people who confuse a data center with a research campus.

It's like trying to sell a fentanyl factory by saying its exhausts contain CO2 and so might stimulate local plant life.

So my feel is, data centers will always have some negative effects on the neighborhood. But how far the neighborhood is willing to tolerate those effects is directly dependant on its view of AI in general.