Taking a step back, if the US unilaterally stops producing AI will other countries stop? The answer is clearly no.
Datacenters and ai can be built and trained anywhere. If you want control over AI you should want it to be built in your own country where you have political representation.
All preventing datacenter buildout will do is ensure that the price remains high and only really rich organizations can access it.
The greatest control I have is probably to have it not get built, though even that is minimal as it has failed to stop the one that is indeed being built in my town.
They don't provide appreciable community value and they effectively mine limited local resources (power, grid capacity, land, water) and sell it as compute, immediately diverting the profit back out of the local economy and into very distant business accounts instead.
Builders choose their targets specifically by how well they can strong-arm weak/vulnerable communities into letting them build these mines through political influence and misrepresentation. It's bad.
What you probably want is to leverage their global market value to establish new power and grid capacity in undeveloped areas, perhaps to someday become a seed for new communities that grow around the infrastructure development work.
But that's much more expensive than bullying and seducing a weak city council so it won't happen with regional/state/federal regulatory protections or incentives that push them away from the exploitative opportunities and towards the constructive ones.
So urgent that Andreesen has a Super PAC to push the dangerous China narrative.
I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.
Is the reason that competence and social trust are declining because of AI? Maybe, but not only that.
It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.
The city councils know it, but the residents don’t.
The entire point of the last 10 years of Strong Towns was talking about municipal finance, infrastructure costs, and the insolvency of the American suburban town.
The entire state of Utah is not broke. Box Elder County is largely a rural community but it is also not broke.
How does HN feel about ai written blogs? Who wants to go stand next to a 30' warehouse?
In the worst case, if your local municipality sides with business over the little guy, that means potential brownouts and water shortages for you.
Most data center cooling works by evaporation. Hot air or hot water from the servers passes through cooling towers, and water is deliberately evaporated into the atmosphere to carry heat away. That water vapor rises, disperses, and eventually falls as precipitation, but not locally, and not on any useful timescale for the watershed it was drawn from. So the water still exists, but it's been removed from the local hydrological system
Then, there's the ecological angle. Even when companies claim green credentials, locals often scrutinize the actual power mix feeding the facility. If the regional grid is coal or gas-heavy, a data center's carbon footprint can be substantial. There are also concerns about diesel backup generators, potential groundwater contamination, and heat discharge.
Then there's an increased power bills for locals situation, although this one is not as clear and is often disputed. The argument typically goes something like this: utilities operate on cost-recovery models. If a massive new load comes onto the grid and requires infrastructure upgrades like new substations, transmission lines, grid hardening. Those capital costs get socialized across all ratepayers. The data center pays for its energy consumption, but not necessarily for the full cost of the infrastructure built to serve it. That gap gets spread to everyone else's bills.
Key point doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Do all these data center buildouts include providing their own power? Seems like the answer is largely no. These companies expect power infrastructure to be supplied by the government, but also want lower taxes.
How is running local gas turbines more efficient than relying on centralised power generation?
Even the transport costs of getting kerosene to them is considerable.
This is a well established playbook - it was used with nuclear. It’s being used with oil transport.
It’s literally the same script.
The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.
There’s no such thing as a red state or blue state, these are fictions created to generate political fighting for no value to society.
Second - many states such as Ohio have begun pushing back strongly against data centers. In Ohio we had been offering tax breaks for construction because we welcomed the economic activity, but thankfully the government here after seeing a lot of pushback across the state has realized providing tax incentives or subsidies is economically and politically stupid relative the benefits of the new data centers.
To your point, they can be built anywhere. So many folks are saying yep, let’s build them somewhere else and drain water and raise energy prices there instead of here.
Smart politics in a state like Ohio would require data centers to relocate corporate jobs to the state or face full or perhaps even surcharges for utility rates because why not?
Not again...
this is especially true for AI use cases, where compute is hugely more important than latency / bandwidth
> you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
So, reallocate some exec comp to a pool that gets bigger when you give shareholders back money?
Would be great to balance the market better between labor and capital, but there's no easy button...
What about self-hosted models?
If it was AI they would take those extra people to get more done. I know of no company that doesn't have more work than they have people. (but they lack the funds/ROI to pay more people)
I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price". Your competitor just doesn't hire in the first place of course.
I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.
Of the dollar, by the dollar, for the dollar ...
Members of Congress, just like everyone else, act in their own self-interest. And unfortunately for pretty much everyone else, their best method of self-preservation is to do nothing, hence the "eunuch" Congress.
Honestly, calling Congress castrated is fine because it is healthy venting about how ineffective they seem at their charter.
Even though it's really charming and compelling to believe, there is no one solvable problem simply requiring elbow grease, voting harder, proprioception of comically vulnerable reproductive organs, etc.
But the admin has repeatedly ignored such restrictions. This check on power also loses it's teeth when the oligarchs align themselves behind the executive branch.
no, we don't. we have a Congress where the majority party members are cowed into submission by the threat of vehement attacks by the President that are likely to torpedo their re-election if you defy him (Massie being the latest casualty)
that's very different than a powerless Congress; having said that, it's clear that the founders did not see the inherent weakness in their system and what could happen if a president decided to ignore the rules and "sue me"
but to be fair, the constitution was written before the civil war, at which time the powers and reach of the federal government was greatly reduced compared to the present
- Look into ways to restricting executive power, or more rightly revert it to its previous state as described by the constitution.
- Repeal the pardon power (or at least seriously amend it)
- Find a way to limit the use or impact of executive orders. I'm honestly not sure of the best way to do this, but executive orders have exploded basically at the same rate that congress has receded. At the moment they are really just "very weak laws" due to the fact that no one can pass a real law anymore.
- A friend of mind suggested that you prohibit naming the political party of a candidate on a ballot. This has a few legal problems (eg: the states individually control their election process) but the spirit of his comment is that the two party system is broken. The founding fathers imaged that the speaker of the house would jealously guard his power against the presidency. ie, they did not imagine that being the same party the speaker of the house would just do whatever the president wanted. So like the other suggestions, I'm not sure of the best solution here, but the party system is at odds with our current system of government, and seems to be doing an even worse job in these polarized times
Some things you cannot fix with laws or reforms. Congress has power right now. The president never enforced the TikTok law, never sought war powers for Iran, etc. A healthy Congress would do something about this. A new law or regulation here might not necessarily fix this problem. This is something of a cultural rot.
I realize these answers might not have been super satisfying. I'm not a political expert, and I'm sure smarter people than me have been working on these problems for a while.
Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.
If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
Energy hungry infrastructure projects pay something called a "large-load tariff" to try to contain their second-order costs from leaking into residential rate payers pay for. It's not perfect, so a datacenter project could trigger some upgrades that cause rates to go up.
The situation is confusing everyone right now because it's impossible for the average person to tell why rates are going up. A lot of utilities are doing things like finally addressing old fire-prone infrastructure (see the California fires) and dealing with inflation for everything from their generation input costs to inflated costs for infrastructure to putting straight of Hormuz-inflated gas in the tanks of their fleet. Customers only see that their rates are going up and AI datacenters are on the news, so they put them together and assume datacenters are to blame for everything. Yet rates are spiking even in places with zero datacenters.
The topic has entered the domain of emotionally charged topics so nuance is hard to come by. Many of the anti-datacenter people are against datacenters as a proxy for their hatred of AI and the electricity and water arguments are just convenient justifications. This is how we arrive at the article.
In some states (like Oregon and Virginia) they do, but in a lot of states the regulations for rate structures are flat among all users so when there's a large surge in new demand the utility will build out new capacity and spread the cost of that new capacity to all rate payers with no regard for the fact that the new capacity would not have been needed without the new demand (from data centers). So everyone who was already using the electricity pays the new higher rates along with the new large-load user.
These companies building data centers will often make a lot of PR statements about how they are fine paying the extra cost for extra use while at the same time lobbying behind the scenes to actually avoid that happening and fighting against changes to utility rate structures that would raise their costs. By and large they can't be trusted.
electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices.
>Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place.
i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
The cities are paying exorbitant prices for electricity to pay for safer infrastructure for rural customers (undergrounding).
Some cities have divested from PG&E and enjoy much lower electricity prices as a result.
In some sense, sure, any time you buy something you apply some upward price pressure. Of course, whether the resulting price changes measurably depends on many things, like the scale of your purchase relative to the scale of the market, the price elasticity of demand, who the marginal buyers and producers are, etc.
First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.
Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.
What won't work is something like "it'll be better for the economy in the entire country, so put up with some disruption for a while." No one likes higher electricity bills while a power plant is being constructed, a new building going up too close to their homes that doesn't create jobs they can apply for, etc. It's a losing message to promise the payoff only years later or indirectly.
1. The taxes can offset the federal cuts so local taxes do not need to be raised. Requires the local gov't officials signing onto the deal in this way, which seems more likely given the massive pushback nation wide.
2. The data centers should be forced to build the energy generation they require. Excess (during off peak) can be fed back into the local grid and lower prices. It's quite likely the energy deficit will be the primary limiting factor to build out. We can also force the data center to pay premium prices, this is within the capability of regulations.
are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution?
governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation
1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash.
2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers.
3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that?
4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
Interestingly, the group is mixed on the Ai topic. Some are anti, some are very excited. We have had amazing discussions without it becoming heated, IRL, because people communicate differently in the flesh.
Seems like an assumption on your part that being pro-data center reflects "vision" and "optimism."
China.
1. They get massive tax breaks;
2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem;
3. They pollute water supplies;
4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for;
5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and
6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored.
AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.
1. got no tax breaks
2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation
3. did not pollute water supplies
4. made electricity prices go down somehow
5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry)
6. was extremely quiet
Would people still be mad about them?
I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."
A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.
Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.
The list is long and includes things like people not being able to afford AC anymore; why are you trying to figure this out?
Tax breaks for business have always been ontroversial. I think it's always been a false economy and businesses have effectively played 50 states off of each other to get tax breaks they don't need and they don't pay tor themselves. Some of the examples of this are almost comical. A great example of the hundreds of millions spent to entice businesses back and forth between Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO, which are literally right next to each other [2].
Oh, and the tax breaks given to stadiums are particularly disgusting unless th emncipality owns the team in question in part or in whole and AFAIK in any top tier sports league, there's only one example of that (ie the Green Bay Packers) and the NFL has made that ownership structure illegal.
But anyway, data centers don't create employment so the usual arguments of "they'll go elsewhere" that were used at the time it was a factory or an auto plant don't apply. Yet they get pedlled out anyway. Residents don't want them and it still happens.
Two points I want to comment on from your list.
The first is you qualified self-generated electricity as green. this is a good and important qualifier. The alternative is what Elon did in Memphis [3], which should be illegal regardless.
The second is the water. That's going to be difficult no matter where you build these things. The big issue there is that data centers add pollutants to the water to keep their pipes clean. That too should be illegal. If you were just, for example, using cold sea or river or lake water for cooling then it wouldn't be a big deal. But data centers don't want that. It might corrode their precious pipes. They might need maintenance more often. Or you could use a heat exchange system where water is used for cooling and you can add what you want to it but it's in a closed loop and external water is used to cool it. This is what nucleaer reactors do. But that too is more expensive.
Now if someone was going to build one of these things out in New Mexico or Arizona that have large stretches of uninhabited land and plentiful sunshine (for solar) it would be a different conversation. Of course, water would be an issue there.
Data centers are a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy. That's really the crux of the problem.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350761
[2]: https://www.mackinac.org/the-left-and-right-agree-to-end-tax...
[3]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/22/epa-thwarts-musks-d...
1. Electricity costs in Maryland jumped 89% over the past year, much more than anywhere else, largely due to an AWS data center expansion: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-pr...
2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities.
While I agree that some downsides of AI are overstated (like water usage), this whole article smacks of paternalistic "the peons just don't understand what's really going on" nonsense. The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.
The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.
It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history.
Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information.
The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.
That's moving the goalposts. While economists acknowledged there would be some disruptions, in the 90s the vast majority of them downplayed what turned out to be prolonged negative effects to huge populations in richer Western countries. And, ironically, it was those negative effects that led to the rise of nationalism and the dismantling of globalization that we see today. I understand folks' objections to some of the opinions and writings of Paul Krugman, but I give him credit for admitting he was wrong: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-10/inequa...
Sure, there aren't many people who deny that globalization lifted millions out of poverty in East Asia. That's not really comforting to folks in the Rust Belt whose communities have been hollowed out and devastated.
Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states)
RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.
But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
Best part is when they figure out how to take their $10-20k donations to the local community as "doing good" and turn it into positive PR spin to the local yokels that don't know any better that they're getting robbed blind daily. They have a full playbook to rob local communities and get them to fall for it and it sucks.
I've watched it happen in Upstate NY and we certainly aren't seeing any benefits of any of it.
Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich?
If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.
This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
Combine them with the tendency to build them in open, flat rural areas that have few or no trees or other buildings to baffle the sound, then run them 24/7, and it becomes a chronic issue for people who live nearby (even miles away, if the acoustics are just right).
That shouldn't have been as much of a problem in the US as it's become, but data centre projects get built near where people live because the infrastructure is already there. That naturally raised it as an issue in the UK, where there's less unpopulated space, before data centres of that scale were built: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/31/data-centre-...
I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.
Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work.
There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field.
And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.
Hear hear.
LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact.
I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).
I know it because i tried ...
The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.
Tear it all down.
And it doesn't help that we are "low value capital" to these people.
Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming
No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock?
She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues.
EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.
You know what I learned? Nobody wants to. People will always choose the more convenient option no matter how bad it is in the long run, even when the far more ethical option is only just slightly less convenient. They choose instant gratification every time. They'll whine about it, they'll swear each new enshittified update or price hike is the last straw, but they will keep paying the bill.
And don't even get me started on trying to get people to donate money to open source projects.
So maybe it counts as victim blaming, and the sociopathic techbros that run these companies are certainly responsible for their own behavior, but, at a certain point... it's hard to blame the lion when the tourists keep walking into its den.
Ya'll wanted the cloud, you wanted Ring doorbells, you wanted Alexas, you wanted Kindles, you wanted ChatGPT to write your emails for you, you wanted iPhones... We've been telling you for years: It's just someone else's computer.
