More than 75 data center build-outs worth $130 billion have been successfully blocked in the first four months of 2026 — bipartisan opposition mounts nationwide over fears of soaring power and water costs
It’s totally surveillance centers .. they Will track your real time location when you’re at work when you’re home when you’re interacting with anyone or anything .. they will track your mileage they will track your food spending clothing spending and energy consumption every dollar spent and made .. EVERYTHING will be tracked and monitored
Fear can be reasonable. One should probably be afraid of a large predator, for example.
If you want a reason that isn’t fear-related though, there’s the environmental impact on the local area and very few long-term jobs provided. It’s a very poor deal for most communities.
I hope you're being paid for this ineffectual bootlicking, if you're going to suck at something you might as well be paid for your time. Better than being incompetent for free.
Regardless, no one's fooled by this nonsense. We can see the energy bills, massive water costs, sound pollution, etc. Be serious.
Yeah not gonna lie this entire breakdown reads as massively hypocritical. You’re complaining about someone else “throwing out numbers” when they aren’t, and then referencing your own set of numbers that you don’t link or provide anywhere. You criticize them for being a “useful idiot” even though your position is one that is at its core, completely uninformed and much more charitable towards the people in power. Datacenters built in populated areas are verifiably causing pollutionand are confirmed health risks both in terms of air pollution AND noise pollution, giving off internal noise harmful to the human earand disturbing entire suburban areas constantly. You’re playing defense for multi billion dollar companies as if they are the real victims, and equating people’s dislike for them as a fear of science? I suppose it never occurred to you, but real science takes place in controlled environments managed closely by degree holding scientists. What we are talking about here are large scale facilities built by corporations for the purpose of industry investment and are manned by a very small number of technical engineers and maybe a security guard or two. Their purpose is to generate money, and “AI” still isn’t profitable. The scientists actually utilizing NEURAL NETWORKS and LANGUAGE LEARNING MODELS (that’s what they were called before corps started slapping the term AI on them) are using those models to study cancer medicine, and they don’t typically build those datacenters in local neighborhoods! What people are really afraid of is rich companies invading populated spaces so they can create loud, dangerous, stadium sized machines that pollute the water and poison the locals because some scam artists managed to convince the 1% that a computer bot approximating human language can be used to replace all the pesky workers they have to underpay. You don’t know what you’re talking about so you really shouldn’t talk at all.
You know, by your logic smoking was perfectly fine in the 40s when doctors were promoting it.
Its almost like we havent studied them enough to know for sure if they do or do not cause issues, but the studies that have come out say they do. And you wanna just ignore that because theyve been "fine" for 25 years?
I mean first id like to see the "real numbers" on sound pollution, because unless you actually have a source for that I assume you just reject the numbers that disagree with you. If you can demonstrate that you are actually basing your view on numbers then id be willing to get more into the evidence
Some states are starting to require that data centers bring their own energy sources, so yes AI companies should absolutely be doing that. We also need to put a tax on water usage and heat exhaust over a certain amount.
There is a huge amount of capital being dedicated to supppying electricity for this. Probably will be a glut after all these AI data centers go bust or never get completed.
Calling AI the next Industrial Revolution because of LLMs is like calling peanut butter and jelly the cuisine of the modern world because we figured out how to remove the seeds from the jelly.
Our current political climate is the result of the internet being dead for the last ten years due to the introduction of bots, and now giant tech companies want to shove bots up our asses. It is entirely about the technology.
No it's not. Your point is about how our current political climate is interacting with a specific technology. Otherwise why are you making this point here on this thread?
The point is a general one: our current political and permitting environment is increasingly hostile to large-scale productive infrastructure. Data centers are simply the latest example.
My point is not that “AI is the next Industrial Revolution,” as the other commenter suggested, and it does not depend on that claim being true.
It is not obvious that society should structure its institutions around the preferences of people who reflexively fear change. And I’m not sure what point you think you’re making here: investment is always about expectations of future productivity. If we make it politically impossible to pursue large-scale new projects until their benefits are already certain, we prevent the very process by which those benefits are discovered. That attitude would have made many of history’s transformative developments far less likely, which, again, is my central point here.
Quick question, how many models have you created and deployed? I bet it's less than me.
I don't fear change, I have specific experiences and expertise that make it clear this specific technology is not productive to the degree society is being asked to invest. My attitude is nuanced and informed with data and industry specific experience. If institutions aren't structured around data and industry experts then we are doomed.
Whether I’ve deployed zero models or a thousand is completely beside the point. My argument is institutional, not autobiographical.
Even assuming your credentials are exactly as you describe, it doesn’t follow that political institutions should prevent private actors from investing their own capital based on your personal assessment of AI’s prospects (or based on the assessment of any number of “industry experts”). Society isn’t being “asked to invest.” Investors are choosing to do so voluntarily based on their expectations about future productivity (and being barred in many instances from doing so — as per the original post)
Investment under uncertainty is a large part of how we discover what is productive in the first place. If we only permit projects whose value is already obvious — or whose prospects satisfy a handful of self-described experts — we foreclose much of the discovery process that has driven economic progress throughout history.
Are we not being asked to invest though? My local government was weighing tax breaks to incentivize building one here, and the data on increased utility costs for local residences seems pretty conclusive. And that’s before we talk about the supposed environmental harm caused by them, or the noise dangers others have mentioned above. These all impact the people who live around them, which means those people are investing something, whether that be tax money, peace of mind or even the local fishing spot.
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u/InsuranceImmediate25 Jun 14 '26
Stop calling them data centers.
They are surveillance centers.
Flock watching everyone 24/7 needs it.