It's inaccurate to claim that the opposition is "completely irrational".

One _extremely_ rational and common reason that people oppose these projects is that they can bid-up the energy cost in their regions, meaning that one of the residents biggest monthly bills gets bigger.

A second one goes around pollution and noise, particularly when the AI DataCenter is using "portable" gas turbines or similar.

Solutions are hard, but possible... so long as the decision makers are able to recognize that much of the opposition is quite rational, and that the deals struck need to accommodate the legitimate and rational concerns, while avoiding getting hung up by true nonsense.

▲

ijk a day ago | parent | next [-]

The portable gas turbine is a somewhat separate issue, in that it's highly illegal but if you have more money than god you can just pay off the fines and the judges.

It's relatively easy to avoid being that egregious about it if you're a little bit patient on construction permits and power contracts.

NIMBY opposition to datacenter construction is orthogonal to that, except insofar as in both cases the construction will gravitate toward places that won't or can't object to the construction.

▲

seanmcdirmid a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In theory, rising energy prices would encourage more investment in capacity increases, that would then real a new equilibrium and so on. In theory of course, energy markets are so distorted now who knows. Having AI data centers bring their own power or power investments is probably going to be necessary.

▲

consensus1 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Residential electricity rates don't get "bid up" like that. Increases typically must be approved by the government and have to be justified by expenses rather than market prices. Ashburn VA, which has more data centers than anywhere else, actually pays below US average rates.

▲

annzabelle a day ago | parent | next [-]

Growing up near Ashburn makes every anti data center argument feel like crazy land. From my perspective when I lived there, they were somewhat ugly large boxes that paid county tax and raised land value. I never noticed any kind of noise from them, though they were largely on industrially zoned land right by the airport. Also gave us single digit ping. Electricity rates are below the national average.

Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.

▲

mukbangpervert a day ago | parent [-]

A few things you might want to consider:

1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)

2) your example primarily used undesirable land.

3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.

4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.

All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.

Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.

Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.

(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")

▲

phil21 a day ago | parent [-]

The only reason Loudon county became datacenter alley is due to where the transatlantic cables landed. And Washington DC being next door.

It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there.

The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area.

Agreed on the tax abatement stuff. Those should be outright illegal regardless of industry.

	▲	mukbangpervert a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree that datacenters showed up because a ton of fibre was already there. I was talking about reasons that the general public of Loudon County has had a positive view toward datacenters -- not why datacenters chose the county (that's a different list entirely). Notably, that the datacenters showed up in a way that offered almost no material downsides to the locals... and that this differs markedly from what many towns face today.
	▲	annzabelle a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's actually because of DARPANET/ARPANET and other early computer research that was military or intelligence funded. It led to a concentration of networking in the region that led to MAE-East and it's all spiraled from there. The transatlantic cables were an aftereffect of everything else. I'm pretty sure they actually come ashore in Virginia Beach and New Jersey, both a solid 4 hour drive away.

▲

lostlogin a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This might be true in the US (which is obviously what the article is about) but it isn’t everywhere. Data centre impact is a concern here in New Zealand and we have a poor track record of handling the impact of large users of electricity. Case in point - the aluminium smelter that has manipulated the entire country power prices (and various other things) via threats.

▲

tzs a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Which market do you mean when talking about "market prices"?

I'm pretty sure the utility where I am has been able to get rate increases approved partly based on rising prices they have to pay to buy power on the wholesale market when they do not have enough capacity of their own to cover all their customers.