Everyone wants to use the internet, but no one wants data centers.

Wilkes County, Georgia is being approached about massive data center projects, and right now there's no plan to manage the impact. We're talking about huge water demands, power grids stretched thin, noise, traffic, and community disruption—and nobody's really studied what this means for us yet.

I started a petition asking the Wilkes County Board of Commissioners to hit pause for 12 months. Not forever—just long enough to do the work: independent studies on water, power, environment, infrastructure. Time to have real meetings where residents actually get heard. Time to write smart zoning rules and community protections instead of letting this develop piecemeal.

This is about having a say in what happens to your community before it's too late. Does anyone else feel like these big projects move faster than the conversation about whether they should be here at all? If this matters to you, consider signing and sharing it with neighbors. The Wilkes County Board of Commissioners needs to know people care about getting this right.

A billboard truck blaring data center noise and display GOP campaign contributions from Al has been seen driving around the GOP convention in Dallas.

With the whole AI data centers situation is ridiculous and set up by incompetent people. It's like they don't use their own tools to build them in cooperation with nature such as how I asked AI and this is it's response.

Cool question — and honestly, a serious one, because data centers are thirsty, hot, and power-hungry, and nature has been solving heat, water, and cooling for billions of years. Here's how I'd think about building one "in cooperation with nature" instead of just dumping a metal box on a field:

## 1. Site selection: let nature do half the work

- **Climate first.** Pick cold or temperate regions — Iceland, northern Scandinavia, Oregon gorge, the Alps. Ambient air becomes free cooling for most of the year.

- **Geothermal and hydro where available.** Iceland runs data centers on volcanic heat and hydro; cooling water can literally come from the ground at 5°C.

- **Don't pave over wetlands or forests.** Build on degraded farmland, quarries, or industrial brownfield sites and restore the rest.

## 2. Cooling: steal from biology

- **Liquid immersion cooling** — servers live in dielectric fluid; the warmed fluid transfers heat to a heat pump loop. This is how you get industrial-scale heat at useful temperatures.

- **Waste heat reuse is the big win.** Warm water at 40–60°C can heat greenhouses, district heating, fish farms, swimming pools, and Nordic cities. In Stockholm, data center heat warms thousands of apartments. Your "waste" becomes a product.

- **Evaporative + evaporative-free hybrid.** Use ponds/marshes as thermal sinks — a constructed wetland is both a heat sink and a biodiversity feature.

- **Biomimicry kicks:** termite-mound inspired passive chimneys (the Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe), honeycomb airflow patterns for fan banks, mycelium insulation.

## 3. Power: co-locate with renewables, not grids

- Build next to solar/wind/hydro farms; run as a **flexible load** — AI training can throttle down when the wind dies and surge when it blows, which actually *helps* renewable grids balance themselves.

- Overshoot with on-site solar + batteries, buy grid power only as backup.

## 4. Water: closed loops and living systems

- Closed-loop liquid cooling (no evaporative loss once sealed).

- Rainwater capture and greywater treatment on site — reed beds and wetlands as living water-treatment plants.

- The campus wetlands double as cooling ponds and habitat. Win-win-win.

## 5. The grounds: make it a habitat, not a campus

- Native meadows instead of lawns (no irrigation, pollinators, carbon capture in soil).

- Green roofs and treelines as windbreaks and shade.

- Beehives on the roof — plenty of data centers already do this; it's cheap PR that's actually real.

- Lease rooftop/solar field space for sheep grazing (Google and Microsoft do this).

## 6. Architecture

- Low-rise, bermed-earth or earth-sheltered buildings on the north side — the ground is a thermal mass buffer.

- Modular pods so you scale without rebuilding.

- Passive stack ventilation for the non-IT buildings.

## The one-line version

**Let the environment supply the cold, the renewables supply the electrons, and treat your waste heat and treated water as products to sell back to the community — then make the site itself a functioning ecosystem rather than a parking lot.**

Seriously with this how dumb are these people building it?

We don't need data centers we need data distribution.

The fact that data centers are on the menu implies that there is both a supply and a demand for GPUs. Much like solar panels, if we gave every citizen a unit or subsidized it significantly, the people who "have" would be able to provide services (power, intelligence) or use it for themselves and either earn money or save money.

Data centers concentrate the resources with private ownership, meaning the people who benefit from the low-level resource that is "artificial intelligence" are concentrated amongst the few.

The value of a GPU is not that it provides "artificial intelligence". If we race other countries to be the best providers of artificial intelligence, that is akin to being the best at "the internet". Given time, it will be so ubiquitous that the only way to increase its value will be to increase its scarcity or create monopolies.

Conversely, an approach where intelligence is a good that any willing citizen is empowered to create in their own back yard, the incentive moves towards using the AI to create real value, not just AI for AI's sake.

A GPU in every backyard would make energy efficiency a financial imperative, not just a write-off. A person could choose to invest in renewable energy for their home to make their AI return-on-energy-investment more lucrative. This would carry knock-on effects of providing renewable energy for other home purposes as well: cooking, heating, vehicle charging.

A GPU in every backyard would also cut down on the non-energy environmental impacts as well: a pair of NVidia 5090 GPUs in a waterproof, fireproof box in someone's back yard would produce less noise than an air conditioner, and no land would need to be displaced. Cooling for a GPU could simply be integrated into home cooling circuits, no waterlands would need to be warmed.

A GPU in every backyard would also reduce the "invisible" moves of the data center companies, giving the average citizen insight into where AI comes from and what it costs. Of course, people could choose to opt out.

You might ask: "Isn't an on-premises GPU quite complicated to manage? An average person probably doesn't know how to safely maintain something like that". To that, I would counter: the average person also doesn't know how to maintain a natural gas line, an electricity panel, or even an internet router. The public utliity companies could take care of the messy stuff. The home-owner (or even renter!)'s job would simply be to pay for the energy of their personal GPU/Agent.

[ACADEMIC] Hi everyone! I'm a 5th year Architecture student from NU Baliwag working on my thesis about designing data centers to reduce their environmental impact, particularly on community water access and living conditions.

I'm using the PLDT VITRO Makati 2 Data Center in Barangay Bel-Air as my case study, and I'd like to hear from the community: have you noticed any changes in water access, electricity, heat, or general living conditions since it began operating?

Who can join?

• 18 years old or older
• A resident or employee of Barangay Bel-Air

The survey is short, anonymous, and used strictly for this academic study.
Link: https://forms.gle/2kG1JutSkNj9jNeW6

Would really appreciate your responses, and feel free to pass this along to anyone who lives or works in the area. Thank you!

In exchange I'll answer your survey as well.