It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

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nemomarx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you want people to be more supportive of it, there are pretty direct ways to do that. Donate heavily to the local community to make up for impact, build new power plants for the project to pay for itself, don't put in gas powered generators, stay away from housing...

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estearum 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or because people see:

1) their electricity bills rising

2) their land prices (read: rent) rising

3) actual fucking nutjobs in charge of these companies who can't seem to simply not say actual nutjob shit all the fucking time

4) entry level jobs disappearing

5) the obvious fact that "I am building the most powerful technology ever" means "the already-powerful people who own these technologies and companies are working to become vastly more powerful"

And I say this as someone who uses and loves using AI heavily across both my personal and professional life. It's better to grapple directly with the fact that people have very legitimate fears and concerns around this technology and the people who own it.

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duped 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.

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pnw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777

	▲	estearum 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price? Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.
	▲	triceratops 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Reading only the abstract: "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach... We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect." I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	duped an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped. That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers. (* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)