They’re almost universally bad for communities so constituents don’t want their councils to approve them?. It’s as simple as that.

Your town gets worse basically forever so the rich can get richer. Queue “hysteria”.

They are also noisy, polluting, and first and foremost we should endeavor to respect the will of the people in a democracy. Of course on some level it is a proxy against AI, but more importantly it's a proxy against the stratification of society. The problem is the gap between rich and poor.

> Communities dont own power production and if usage causes costs to increase then investment in more production will follow.

Years of higher electricity price is good reason to be against. The communities gain nothing from those data centers, so it is a bad deal.

And yes, AI industry made an extraordinary achievment in making themselves hated. 10/10 success of their own marketing and PR.

The data center hosting this website is already built, unlike the ones people are fighting against.

I'll grant the general public may not understand enough that they already rely on "datacenters", but there are reasonable arguments against gigawatt buildouts for AI, while still using technologies that run in datacenters in general.

This website is hosted on a single server. I was being hyperbolic sure, but we don't need the number of data centers we have by a huge margin, the primary reason they exist is because building software that runs on people's computers is not compatible with greedmaxxing.

First, this is just the standard "You're criticizing X, yet you use X. Checkmate" trope.

Second, there is an obvious difference in scale here which you're ignoring.

Third, a website that can run on a pair of servers doesn't actually need to be, and the world would be better off if fewer were.

Which you have without this data center being built.

Also, towns can craft datacenter deals that produce public benefits. It’s expensive fixed infrastructure within their taxing jurisdiction.

The intersection of users and neighbors of AI data centers is probably much smaller than you think.

The boom in datacenter construction is driven mostly by the AI boom and most of us are sick everything AI too. We don't want to read AI slop, watch AI videos, talk AI customer service or visit a vibe coded website.

Billionaires are providing much less value than we would have if random kids who lost the birth lottery were empowered to reach their potential to help society. We should not allow them to exist.

You keep saying this, care to explain?