I was actually pretty worried that the anti-datacenter backlash would stunt and important industry (for the US).

But I think the effect will be that the companies building them will "sweeten" the deal for the local towns where they are building -- probably by way of taxes. And while that will be a drag on their development (by adding costs), the scale won't be bad enough to really hurt.

And in that sense, everyone wins. The locales will be happy to have the extra resources. And the ones that don't take the "bribe" -- or whatever you want to call it -- won't get datacenters.

(But I do agree that panic is overblown and counterproductive.)

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9cb14c1ec0 an hour ago | parent [-]

> "sweeten" the deal for the local towns where they are building

Yes. And datacenter companies have to foolish to slow-walk doing this. When you are building a 10 to 50 billion dollar construction project, it may be worth giving the local town 100 million (plus 10k directly to every resident) to do with as they please, and it would certainly grease the wheels.

	▲	jpgvm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They are slow walking it because you simply can't build the generation fast enough anyway. It's also why you are seeing a lot of project with their own generation plants on site, either stuff like the SpaceX/X/AI (I dunno what you call it man) datacenters - i.e very adhoc methane stuff or proper LNG generators ala Meta. This is mostly an America problem right now because that is where everyone wants to build the DCs and it's the market with the most stagnant generation: https://en.macromicro.me/collections/26367/electricity/14247...