Apart from water usage which can be solved by using recycled water or closed loop cooling i fail to see what all the hysteria is over. Communities dont own power production and if usage causes costs to increase then investment in more production will follow.

The level of vitriol i see in all countries over data centers is looking more and more as a proxy against ai.

You can really see how a terrawatt of ai compute in space will make alot of sense vs on earth.

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.