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| ▲ | ashleyn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them. Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics. There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns. What frustrates me about the new political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage. | | |
| ▲ | scheme271 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It doesn't help that at least one datacenter operator and possibly more promised municipalities in Arizona that they wouldn't use their water and then secretly used millions of gallons. This in the middle of water shortages. | | |
| ▲ | creato an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't know what timeframe we are talking about here, but 1 million gallons is how much 33 people in the US use in a year. It's really not that much water. | | |
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| ▲ | kleton 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The water thing It’s amazing how Karen Hao managed to graduate from MIT without learning the difference between m^3 and L | |
| ▲ | DANmode 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The water thing is, I think, baloney It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places. What exactly are you saying is baloney? | | |
| ▲ | namdnay 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The water sediment thing had nothing to do with the building being a data center I think? Any form of construction would interfere with people drinking well water next to it | | |
| ▲ | tommica 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Isn't that enough to rethink the construction - it takes a while to build a data center, and I would not be happy that I have to suffer with shitty water because a data center is being built for years. | | |
| ▲ | namdnay 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | What I mean is that it’s got nothing to do with data centers. Saying “data centers pollute water” is misleading, in these situations 1) we’re talking about people pulling unfiltered untreated well water 2) any building would have had exactly the same effect. | | |
| ▲ | techpression 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | What? How is a data center that runs insane amounts of water through it every single day the same as a warehouse with a tap and bathroom? And sure, a rocket launch pad would also cause issues, but now it’s a data center that is doing it, let’s not argue fictional realities. |
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| ▲ | DANmode 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am not talking about sediment, or anything construction-related. This is normal operations being done irresponsibly: 1.) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/meta-datacen... 2.) https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/saline-township-residen... | | |
| ▲ | namdnay 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Did you read the guardian article? It’s a bit of a nothing-burger, are we really going to have a national panic based on that? > flushed bacteria-contaminated water into public sewers I do that every morning |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. To put a finer and much-angrier point on how this connects to the backlash: 1. Traditionally, Americans have been protected from certain kinds of harm by certain federal laws. Where present, these laws take priority (supremacy clause) over state laws. (i.e. The Clean Air Act.) 2. Due to certain people of one party controlling the federal government today, American communities are no longer getting justice under those laws. This is because the facility-owners (i.e. xAI and Elon Musk) are capable of bribing the federal government into ignoring or impeding the law. (i.e. no help from the EPA, while the DoJ claims the facility has a "national security" exception to pollute.) 3. Since communities are robbed of normal protection from federal laws, they must instead try to use other measures like state/local laws. 4. Due the different responsibility-areas of state/federal laws, this often means preventing the facility from being begun at all, as opposed to focused limits on what happens during construction and operation. ____ TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead. | | |
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| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box. I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day. | | |
| ▲ | ericcumbee 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Property Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc. I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers. The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is. | | |
| ▲ | da_chicken 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. They're all drain. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is the opposite of the truth. For instance: https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora... | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How is spending $24 million a year on taxes not evidence that they lobbied, and received tax breaks and exemptions? The reason they picked that location was because they get reduced rates. 50% off energy taxes. Reduced property taxes. I could go on. https://siteselection.com/how-illinois-built-a-dream-home-fo... Unless your arguing an example of a data centre that only received a tax break rather than exemption? | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Property taxes are ordinarily a percentage of the value of the land and structures because in most cases it has some approximation to services consumed. A building with twice as many condo units might require twice as many police, create twice as much traffic, etc. A large data center could plausibly be sitting on a piece of land worth a million dollars and then have a billion dollars worth of equipment in it, but still not require any more police officers or traffic lanes etc. than the million dollar piece of land sitting next to it. It might even require less. It's easy for a town to come out ahead from that even after providing significant tax breaks. When you have something consuming the same unit of services while having an assessed value of 1000x the typical amount, what percentage tax break they would have to get before the government isn't coming out ahead? | | |
| ▲ | f4c39012 a minute ago | parent [-] | | You're missing the point. Towns come out ahead when the people living there come out ahead. I'm not arguing with your math, but your math is also a straight line to a town with no people at all being better. Towns are for _people_. |
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| ▲ | da_chicken 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, it's exactly the truth: https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a... The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power. | | |
| ▲ | ToValueFunfetti 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd think that the claim >Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions. is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken? | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You made a categorical claim. We can't both be right; one of us has to be wrong. So what's false in the report I just linked to? |
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| ▲ | joe_the_user 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing. Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these. | | |
| ▲ | AussieWog93 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not a data centre expert, but don't they quite famously pump CO2 into the server rooms automatically if the fire alarms go off, even if there are people in the room? | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero an hour ago | parent [-] | | That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster. |
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| ▲ | ab5tract 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts. | |
| ▲ | altmanaltman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall. But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes. If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method. | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily. | | |
| ▲ | locknitpicker 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily. This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you. Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up out of nowhere at ever spot because someone failed to do PR. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere. Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace. > because someone failed to do PR They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion. | | |
| ▲ | perpetuallunch an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices. The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer. What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve? If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer My understanding is this wasn't done. > What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? The most understandable explanations I've heard had to do with grid upgrades. Crap the utility owns and controls and has to change to accomodate the new power flows. More often, however, it looks like local and state government engaging in industrial policy by trying to get residents to subsidise the new datacenters. | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Upgrades also take time and may not be a good idea seeing how the current AI buildout is financed. There is a certain amount of capacity right now and AI behemoths have the financial muscle to take what's there. If that leaves too little for everyone else, prices will reflect that as soon as existing contracts allow. |
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| ▲ | kulahan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve heard there’s misinformation regarding water use. As far as I’ve heard, these data centers use quite a bit. I imagine they just use them for cooking and spit it back out warmer (though if we’re going to do that, I’d prefer we do it cooling a nuclear power plant, personally…) Is this not accurate? Are there any good resources that aren’t like… these companies being super honest about how super good they are? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Construction Physics [1] and Hank Green [2] have done good takes. Broadly speaking, most general-use datacenters use evaporative cooling (i.e. open loop) because it's cheap [3]. AI datacenters reject so much heat, however, that even absent public pressure they pretty much need closed loops [4]. The misconception is that while both of these processes use a lot of water, we both have and use tremendously more. That makes their levels tiny compared with plenty of uncontroversial, thoughtless uses. And the increasing efficiency makes this a choke point across medium-term scaling. (And replacing an AI datacenter with a conventional one counterproductive from a water-conservation perspective.) Power—and with it, noise, air pollution and grid-upgrade costs—is the real and present problem. [1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=240s [3] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275... [4] https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-liquid-cooling-sta... | |
| ▲ | DaSHacka 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I haven't heard of many open-loop cooling systems like that in HPC datacenters. The majority I've seen use closed loop, where the water never leaves the system. Similar to most watercooled gaming PC rigs. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reality is that there are two approaches for water: open loop and closed loop, and you can guess correctly at what they mean. The problem is that's subtle and we can't have subtle conversations about things. | | |
| ▲ | dividedbyzero 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The problem is not that subtle, the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy. The former aren't very problematic, often pretty good neighbors even, while the latter are nightmare fuel and will purposely not be built to be quiet and safe and stay within available energy capacity and not deplete struggling water tables, and they have the financial and political clout behind them to get away with pretty much anything. Small wonder no one wants them anywhere near them. Traditional DCs might be able to not be a nuisance despite using evaporative cooling, but no one would build that anywhere where there is a shortage of water, and the amount of heat to be dissipated by such a DC is way smaller. But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs
and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble. Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties. |
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| ▲ | lovich 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nah, I back the Abundance movement and have voted for building new housing complexes in my town against groups who claimed it would ruin the character of our town to have a 60 acre plot near an old industrial center turned into neighborhoods. Even so, given no other data I would default to no for any data center. Too many of them are doing the “move fast and break things” model while not paying for any of their externalities. If they really want to build in my location they can pay for the extra costs up front instead of claiming that somehow miraculously the economics will work out and they will definitely employ the same amount of people to maintain the building as they did to make the building. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors. | | |
| ▲ | shit_game 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door. | | |
| ▲ | MrDrMcCoy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate. (Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.) | | |
| ▲ | scheme271 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The data center might be more attractive but the office building provides more jobs and resources to the local community. You skipped that point in your reply. Even if most of the people working in the office building aren't from the area, those people are getting food and other services from local businesses. All that money goes to the local community and supports local businesses. | |
| ▲ | rtpg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right? Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right? I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated. The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago. | | |
| ▲ | rtpg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Most of the lots are empty. Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't? > Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated. I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc? I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice! But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right? Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction? (in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?) (Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better) | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of it. CHI1 is ringed by a single two-sided line of spots. Every big box retailer is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt larger than CHI1 itself. | | |
| ▲ | ljm 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It amuses me that you have consistently refused to draw the connection to this 'ocean' of asphalt and the purpose of the building it was designed for and are basically being obtuse. But you know what is a better neighbour than a data centre or an office or a strip mall? A nice public park and local shops that support the community without you having to drive your car a distance that in any other country would be easily walkable. Why would anybody want a monolithic megastructure sat next to their house that offers nothing good to the community itself? There is no upside for the locals. No improvement to quality of life. | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | techpression 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Feels like you’re cherry picking to make a point, so here’s some cherry picking on the other side https://www.fierce-network.com/data-center/top-10-ugliest-da... So much dead ugly space, and let’s not look at them at night with enough external lighting to see from space (almost) |
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| ▲ | MrDrMcCoy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You'd take a featureless, opaque warehouse over a structure with windows and architecture that was intended to stand out? The asphalt doesn't have to be an eyesore if planned well, either. Copious vegetation woven throughout, painted teal or with murals instead of black, a policy of "after the following hours, locals are allowed to play roller-hockey and tennis here.", host regular farmer's markets, etc. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'd love to see a Google Maps picture of a large, attractive parking lot. |
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| ▲ | jrflowers 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wait are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers Do you think a community is your house | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The office buildings next to the CyrusOne data centers in the western suburbs are not filled with people from Aurora. They're filled with commuters. | | |
| ▲ | lovich 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do they not eat lunch? Or do any local shopping? The literal foot traffic of office workers was a major reason brought up by cities trying to force companies to RTO post pandemic. | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? The data centers? Also what does the specific building or set of buildings you hate in one town have to do with the concept of office buildings | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated. We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments. | | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers >Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated. Since neither are data centers, which aren’t filled with workers, you could’ve just said “yeah” “Office buildings bring less to communities than data centers because of all the people that work in them” lmao |
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| ▲ | gilthelander 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople. These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office. | | |
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| ▲ | rtpg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > nobody moralizes office buildings I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right? Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up. | | |
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| ▲ | silisili 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Office buildings presumably are filled with bodies who get paid, who will spend some amount of money in the local economy. I'm not sure data centers could make the same argument. | | |
| ▲ | mlinhares 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The agents will leave the data center and buy stuff from the local economy, didn’t you hear that? |
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| ▲ | duskdozer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nobody? I do, and I've seen plenty others. | |
| ▲ | Teever 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People have been talking about these issues for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Small_Urban... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Marohn https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Delahanty | |
| ▲ | locknitpicker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit. I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods. Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue. |
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| ▲ | gilthelander 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > generate almost nothing for the local community HN forgets how edge computing or even Cloudflare works. > Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants Ground floor retail in every datacenter. More nail salons, a Halloween store open for two months out of the year, and boutique bakeries (that will be out of business in 6 months). |
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| ▲ | Johnny555 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility) The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... | | |
| ▲ | ComputerGuru 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape. | | |
| ▲ | bob1029 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time. Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity. These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science. | | |
| ▲ | ChickeNES 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. Why not batteries? | |
| ▲ | esseph 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. They could be training a model or two for months. |
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| ▲ | svara 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere. So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure. | |
| ▲ | mixdup 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls. It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press | |
| ▲ | gensym 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side. Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country). But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much. | |
| ▲ | gilthelander 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You might want to let the angry townspeople know because they're already passing symbolic measures and convincing the abuelas they're going to drain Lake Michigan to power these things: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2026/07/27/hawthorne-race-cours... Isn't Chicago filled with rail yards full of humming diesel locomotives? I couldn't think of a bigger eyesore. You can't plant trees in a rail yard. The present anti-datacenter hysteria reeks of the "5G mind control cancer machines" of a few years ago. | | |
| ▲ | warkdarrior 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You can't plant trees in a rail yard. Why not? | | |
| ▲ | perpetuallunch 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Seen what a tree can do to a sidewalk? You can step over or walk around cracked and buckled concrete. Trains don’t appreciate having their rail ballast disturbed. | | |
| ▲ | egormakarov an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think trains are ok with trees. I checked satellite view - there are a lot of rail tracks in Chicago going directly along tree lines. The rail yards indeed look like tracks on concrete with nothing else, but when I look at German ones - there are trees and bushes. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The trains have a bad habit of hitting them. | |
| ▲ | ekianjo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | because of... rails |
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| ▲ | veunes 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems | | | |
| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | locknitpicker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers. Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood. > The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know? > But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7. Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop. | | |
| ▲ | stevenhuang 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You are confusing construction of data centers with their normal operation. Data centers are silent in normal operation. It's the construction you're hearing about that is noisy, but that goes for any construction. | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything. Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude. |
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