That makes no sense: are they going to use this datacenter exclusively for Nashville people use? We regularly access data from datacenters thousands of kilometers away, and the latency is acceptable. Not even pro-gamers would notice the latency increase if the datacenter moved 10 kilometers further in any direction, which is virtually empty in Nashville.

I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.

We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.

Right? How do people not understand this? Have fun with your super-high latency when the DCs leave your city.

That depends highly on the datacenter. While a huge hyperscaler might be noisy, many datacenters are quiet enough that people don’t even know they’re there.

The one I host at, you can’t hear from the end of the parking lot. The coolers aren’t any noisier than the ones on other commercial buildings. These kinds of datacenters are everywhere and most people probably just think they are warehouse or office building.

I'm sure there are data centers that make a noise. And if you're firing up a generator that's a separate issue.

But the noise from computer fans and power supplies is easy to ameliorate and can be a trivial permit requirement.

The noise is all high-frequency which means most anything will stop it. Frankly building an earth berm around the site would kill all the noise and make it better to look at. Throw in some trees and you're done.

I get the water and power concerns. But (in the right locations) both are solvable. Power can be balanced with power generation (off site) especially solar and wind. Water isn't really "used" it's just necessary as a heat-sink so as long as it's available it can stay available.

Yes, govt should write permits carefully. And there are locations it is not suitable. But opposition to data centers in general is just hype.