Kevin Oleary's data center is going to be built one hour from my town. A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center. Here's what I hear and my response:

"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake

"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.

My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.

I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?

Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...

These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.

There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.

> They're generating their own electricity

Yeah, from natgas right? Or maybe diesel generators? Or are they building one of the practically nonexistent green energy data centers?

I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"

Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.

How are they generating this electricity without competing for resources generally?

There is also the increase in cost of borrowing for everyone. Going this fast is just insane.

You live in Snowville?

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.

Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.

The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.

It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...

The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land.

It uses less water than many other things, too, I'm sure.

But the farm made food. What does the data center create that humans need to survive?

Why not just build the data center right on Oleary's land, right next to his mansion? He'll create jobs there too.

It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.

And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.

The details are definitely fuzzy when you talk to people. At the same time, the sentiment is fairly solid. People do not like AI. They do like food. A farm may use more water, but people want the output of the farm. They don't want the output of the data centers.

That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.

The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

So the farm is no longer there? As in it is using zero water right now?

> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

Serious doubt. They will use whichever is cheaper, and that's going to be the grid.

> "Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake

A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise

Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"

This is why it's important for government to be built on principles and law, not merely on popular opinion.

From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.

What does the farm grow? Is it less valuable than what the data center will produce? Because you can't eat data. Utah is full of empty spaces that aren't being put to use (except maybe to set land speed records). Why not use those?

As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.

Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?

That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Utah

It doesn't matter what their reasons are. It's their community

The natural gas they are burning is being bought from the market and that will more than likely lead to increased natural gas costs.

> It's going to use less water than the farm

A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.

> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.

> "Noise"

Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.

> "Wildlife refuge"

I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.

These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.

This is the crux of the whole thing is it not? People want money into their communities and even more into their pockets:

https://nationalsecurity.virginia.edu/research/what-american...

But not everything turns out fine:

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/richland-p...

Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.

My concern is that so much of what is going on with data centers in general ( and from what I have read, this one also ) is everything that is kept private from the communities. People need to stop acting like the people are not part of the government and don't have a say. We may elect representation, but we are still in charge.

>"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.

>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid

I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.

>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.

Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.

"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"

How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.

In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.

I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.

I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.

The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.

People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.

The water you cite is groundwater. It does not return in the same lifetime it is consumed at that rate. Gaining in this context simply means losing less than before. Weasel words are exactly why voters reject building AI.

The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.

I think that part of the problem might be that people don't trust corporations. Sure, they say all that, and that may even be the current plan, but is that how things will actually end up? Will there be consequences "unintended" consequences like polution? Will this be used as a stepping stone to something that is harmful?

Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.

I don't trust the datacenter side of the table at all. I don't trust their claims. I don't trust their numbers. We have myriad examples of their lies. Do we have any examples of them being good corporate citizens that offset this?

I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.

There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?

It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.

If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.

Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?

> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.

comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation

There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities

It's a question of what the gain is. The perceived gain is currently zero. So even any tiny risk of any drawback gets a "no" vote.

I think that a lot of people are more sophisticated than you think, and see data center buildouts as WeWork-style unsustainable growth spurred by speculative fervour rather than business fundamentals.

few points: 1. the water usage claim is reported only by developer. However, the developer omitted the fact that more water is also need to cool down the gas power plant. The project reported only water used by the DC directly. 2. so far nothing firm is committed regarding the DC will produce power on site. I would be careful with what developer claims vs. the reality. 3. isn't the problematic refuge around Locomotive Springs? 4. sure, if you live 1hour away from the DC you won't have issue with noise. But what about the communities closer to the DC? 5. the DC is planning to use as much power as the whole Utah, what will happen with the waste heat energy?

It’s might create a massive localized heat problem https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

I think a lot of this can be chalked up to poor regulation. People think it will cause bad effects because the government bodies and processes are not trusted to prevent that.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?

I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.

In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.

I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.

In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.

You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.

Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".

Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?

Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers: * Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc). * Massive economic destabilization and disruption * Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility * Wars and international conflict * Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry * Takeover by governments, use by threat actors * A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.

People are really underestimating how much influence tiktok has over the gen pop.

This is my read of it, I don't really have any special data about the average voter, so feel free to disregard my opinions.

I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.

I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"

At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.

That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.

Has anyone said they don't like Kevin Oleary? That's usually good enough.

This is classic Haidt's Righteous Mind stuff -- people vibe out a moral judgement, then generate rational explanations post-hoc. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out what the vibed judgement is.

Did you research the reasons in favor building it with the same rigor? What was the outcome?

You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.

It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.

Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.

> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county

How much?

Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls

Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.

And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.

"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.

Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.

WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."

And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.

Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.

A farm produces food that people can eat. A data center runs AI that takes people's jobs and produces... vibe coded websites that look like trash.

You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for

> I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here.

i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm

It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.

Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.

Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.

But then what's the implication here? Why would there be large scale propaganda or otherwise effort against large companies who have and make a lot of money? In whose interest is it to get people to dislike the data centers (other than, perhaps debatably, the people themselves)? If its all truly just people being duped, to what end does the naïvete serve?

I'd pretty much oppose anything Kevin O'leary was involved in, too.

My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)

ps. Have never used tiktok

If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.

>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?

Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.

> The county is gaining water from this

All farming should be stopped immediately and converted to data centres, then we’ll have unlimited water!

I think you’re too focused on the actual facts. My take: people hate them because they are a physical manifestation of the tech bro billionaires.

People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.

The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.

data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.

Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.

[dead]

It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.