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There is a great new Substack article about the populist backlash to AI data centers by Jasmine Sun. She also did an interview with Ezra Klein for those of you who like audio content.
I like the article because Sun speaks fluent Silicon Valleyish while also taking the time and effort to visit and talk to the people on the ground in the rural Midwest instead of condecending at them from the coasts. She asks an important question: why precisely do people hate data centers so much?
Looking only at the statistics, AI land use and water use issues are fake. Nowhere is running out of land, and nowhere (West of San Antonio at least) is running out of water. Are the people in these communities stupid? Do they not know how to shut up and multiply?
It turns out that a lot of the fear and anger stems from a combination of distrust and PTSD from deindustrialization. An interesting example is Janesville, Wisconsin, a town with a giant concrete slab in the middle of it where the GM plant used to be.
Fascinating. The collapse of the auto industry in 2008 was apparently so bad that it is better to prevent industrial development alltogether in order to avoid the risk of another collapse. It almost makes sense until you think about it for 30 seconds.
Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.
This is the steelman of the anti-data center position. People are worried that the big companies proposing data centers are going to Foxconn them and not deliver the supposed benefits.
One of the things that comes across especially clear in the Ezra Klein interview is just how unprepared the AI companies were for the backlash. They didn't realize how sketchy it comes across to insist on NDAs with local officials when negotiating deals. They thought, as a straightforward application of Coase's Theorem would tell you, that any bumps in the road could be ironed out by handing over a big bag of money. It turns out that people don't work that way. It feels like a bribe, and Americans do not like being bribed.
That attitude makes sense to me, assuming you think a crash is likely in the short term.
If a place is reliably poor, people can plan around it. Young people can move to other cities where there is more work and those who stay can plan for a smaller lifestyle.
If the town builds up high around money coming off a new data center then there will be significant damage if a crash happens. There will be people stuck with mortgages they can't pay off, lots of businesses going under, and families who have put down roots facing the choice between moving and having no job.
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I think data centers have the potential to benefit the municipalities that they build in. Some jobs, upgraded infrastructure, lower prices. But do I trust every municipality in the US, great and small, to competently and non-corruptibly negotiate with sharks from trillion dollar companies? Haha no, I'm sure some municipalities will get fleeced or sold out.
That's probably the biggest source of anxiety even though on net they should be a benefit.
Do you think this concern is silly? I'm not sure what your opinion actually is?
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Surely there's a town with a data center they can go ask how good it was for them? Or do they all have NDAs too?
Seems to me to be a perfectly solvable problem, just show the value. If they can deliver jobs and tax money to localities, they will be welcomed. If it's all a pyramid scheme to saddle local governments with tech companies' expansion costs, that will come out too. Just takes some time.
Are these new datacenters really that different from the ones we've been building for literally decades? AWS and Google have had giant server farms longer than anyone was really looking at machine learning like today. Heck, I remember people complaining about the NSA's data center in Utah slurping up all our emails, not its water usage. Complaining about this seems a new idea, but I don't recall too many complaints about the facilities previously. On the other hand, maybe it's like fracking, which wasn't new a decade ago, but really took off at scale.
On the gripping hand, I'm really not sure who's paying for all these new data centers, how they intend to pay the bills if AI tokens are fully commoditized, or why they're being put close to neighborhoods. AWS has existed in multiple locations (they don't disclose exact addresses, but it's probably not a single building) for a long time, and doesn't seem to have garnered quite the same level of complaints.
All data centers have a mix of computation, data storage, and network connections in different proportions.
Netflix requires massive amounts of bandwidth to serve streaming HD video, so their data centers have (relatively) oversized fiber optic cables connecting them to the rest of the internet. YouTube has tons and tons of data relative to how much it's viewed (how many YouTube videos have <100 views? How many Netflix ones do?), so they need relatively large amounts of data storage.
AI is about as close as you can get to pure computation^1 (not much data is stored, and sending text at human-readable speeds is utterly negligible), so their data centers have modest bandwidth and storage, but massive amounts of processing. That takes more power and therefore cooling than other types. Claude found around 1-2 MW of power consumption per acre (of the full site, not just the building footprint) compared to about 0.1 MW/acre for heavy industry like smelters or 0.3-1 MW/acre for other big data centers.
^1 Crypto miners are apparently even more computation-heavy relative to bandwidth and storage, but they aren't exactly popular either.
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A bit different. They use significantly more power and they're being built in such a hurry that the classical hyperscaler commitments to doing it carbon neutrally or with highly sophisticated cooling that leverages natural advantages and keeps power draw down are being dispensed with.
A famous example is the one Elon built in a hurry where they placed a ton of natural gas generators on site because the local grid couldn't supply them, possibly in violation of environmental impact rules.
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I think Meta must have anticipated there being some opposition over a decade ago because we’ve near always coupled datacenter construction with big charitable projects. The earliest I can remember is Forest City, NC. Not only did we present the datacenter itself as bringing well paid jobs to one of the poorest communities in the state, but I remember us doing grants to nonprofits, donations to schools, and providing free broadband services.
The company puts out press releases but I’ve never seen anything about these programs in a news article.
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I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable. Clearly a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that this is a massively transformative technology that will be vital to the future of the country if not the world. They're frequently either outright singularitans, or simply believe that it willl turbo-charge the economy, massively increase wealth, change everything about employment, and so on.
But these people, and I admit I think they sound a lot more sensible than the tech people online, actually use the technology and go, "meh". They see it as a mildly amusing toy. Maybe it has some uses, in some niche fields, but for the most part it's just not very interesting. If they didn't get access to it, they would not particularly care.
An auto factory - you at least understand why cars are useful, and why the factories need to be built. A data centre is a huge investment for a thing that... isn't useful. All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
There is the marketing issue as well, of course. Pro-'AI' people tend to sound very cult-y online, at least in my experience. Many of them sound like lunatics. A lot of them also, well, to be blunt, are un-charismatic nerds. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are not convincing ambassadors for a technology. I can understand nobody believing their promises - none of them project credibility, or even really respectability. The 'tech billionaire' is a cultural archetype at this point, and it is an archetype that one associates with immaturity, frivolity, narcissism, and callous disregard for other people and for human value in general. Last week I was talking about the book destruction story and it fits with the image again, as if there's this small cult-like group of anti-human tech-heads eager to sell the whole inheritance of the human community for digital pottage. I understand, in my gut, the feeling of disgust.
Except the people spending all this money on them? Dave wants his book proofread more cheaply, Pete wants to ERP, Melanie wants dashboards to show key business insights, John wants some spreadsheets analyzed, Dean wants to fix bugs in his software. Even Johnny Jihadi wants to know how to make use of unexploded munitions left by govt forces in the Sahel and he goes to AI for that.
Why would the opinions of people who don't pay for the product because they don't find it useful outweigh those who do?
How does that address the point? People advocating against data centres do so on the basis that constructing data centres affects the communities they live in. That's why they get a say. People care about things that affect them. People who pay for chatbots don't get some sort of veto over people who don't. That would be lunatic.
That was the point of Sun's comparison to cars. You may grumble at an auto factory, but you do, at least, understand why cars are necessary. Even if you personally don't own a car and rely on public transport to get everywhere, it's obvious that there's real public demand for cars, on the basis of their obvious usefulness. You might not want a factory near you, but you understand why there need to be factories somewhere. LLMs have not cleared that hurdle. It seems that large numbers of people do not see why these things are so necessary that all these data centres should be built. We could just, you know, not have LLMs. That's an option.
The examples you give - proofreading a book, cybersex, reading spreadsheets - are generally all in the 'toy' category. Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions. The use cases for LLMs are so marginal that there is no publicly-felt sense of why they are needed, certainly to the extent of justifying the demands that data centre construction make on the public.
LLMs are obviously useful in the same way that businesses obviously need to analyse spreadsheets and obviously need to write code, amongst a myriad of other tasks where LLMs are useful.
The point you were putting forth is that because LLMs aren't very useful (except for some niche fields) and aren't interesting, there is no need to build datacentres. But that's not the case. We can discern that's not the case because people are prepared to pay for these LLMs. The general public. Coders. Companies. Militaries. Governments.
It is abundantly clear that LLM technology is in fact useful and there is an abundance of examples to back this up. Use of LLMs for targeting/ISR in the Iran war, use of LLMs in hacking, use of LLMs in writing code, use of LLMs in mathematics research, chemistry and biology, use of LLMs in entertainment, making images, translation, proofreading, examining legal or financial data. These are not niche fields.
So people are prepared to sacrifice money for these things, which is why these companies are building datacentres. They're not being built without reason. Companies are paying for all this compute and electricity. Sure, the electricity use is an issue for local communities. Industry has been known to require power, make noise and pollution, which should all ideally be minimized.
Again, this is not the case. If googling was just as easy then he'd do that and not waste time jailbreaking AIs instead.
It does seem that many people don't see a use for AI. But they're wrong about that, maybe they haven't looked into it or misunderstand what is going on.
I'm not actually sure they are widely useful. So far the primary use case for them is coding, right? But not very many people are coders, it's a niche field, and as Freddie has argued (disclaimer: I do not wholly agree with him), very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
But even if we grant that LLMs are very useful in the handful of niche fields where they are currently used, the problems remain that 1) most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses, and 2) most members of the public do not think those uses are worth the costs they are being asked to bear.
If software is a niche field, then the US is a niche economy. And, although the public might think math and software is pointless stuff for nerds, they do care about cratering the economy.
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I think more than that there is also the case that people understand the value that a factory provides to the local community while data centers are just a blight locally and producing value elsewhere, perhaps not even in your state, nevermind your town.
So you might then say that the companies should compensate the locals for this. Well, for one, they're generally not proposing to do that (remotely commensurate with the costs they impose) and secondly people don't believe them even when they are proposing that. Companies a well known to lie outrageously about things like data center employment even before the AI boom.
Sun did talk about the companies trying to figure out how much they need to 'bribe' people. I'm not sure the deficit is just money. It seems like, in her argument at least, it's a combination of both trust and public utility.
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People would be just as happy to continue doing the same thing they always have. Only a minority of workers are interested in improving productivity numbers, and they're significantly outnumbered by those worried about the change and displacements improved productivity will bring.
What thinks AI is worth massive sacrifice and investment is Capital itself. Capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence etc. Whatever complaints humans might have, they're just the collective substrate that a higher agency is built on, and that has its own desires for reproduction and extension and data centers.
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Interestingly, Pat Boyle dropped dropped a new one that delves into the financial crux of the problem surrounding AI. I think these data centers are being built in a similar vein to all the ghost cities that went up in China before their enormous overcapacity really hit them in the face. It’s being built on the expectation that everyone is awaiting with eager anticipation for this “boom” to happen, that’s unlikely to materialize.
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Normies use the ChatGPT app, and from what I see, the results are often worthless garbage. I mean a significant fraction of the time it's literally on the level of "Please design me a rectangle." "Ok, here's that triangle you asked for."
A lot of that is surely user error, but the entire pitch is that it can field natural language requests. There's a minor IRL issue of local flyers with QR codes that don't work because the person just asked for "A flyer with a QR code" and the free version on mobile at least doesn't ask follow-up questions like "Is the QR code supposed to actually do anything?"
Free AI:
Paid AI:
https://x.com/goodside/status/2084088205582778713
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing
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People want better food, clothing and shelter. They want better healthcare. They want safety, love, belonging and a feeling of self-esteem. Lastly, they want to self-actualize.
AI helps with none of the physiological needs. It actively makes job security worse and channels our communications through a digital middle-man, worsening shared love and belonging. It renders your skills moot by skill-mogging you, decimating your self-esteem. And lastly, it's nature questions the reason for our very existence, throwing self-actualization into a tizzy.
AI automates humans. AI makes 'creative' content for free. AI personalizes ads perfectly. Other than those in the capital class, who wants this. What member of proletariat 'benefits' from AI ?
That's underselling it. If you wrote super-villians that behave like Altman, Dario, Zuck and Elon, then the editor would can your script for being too on the nose.
Is it an archetype ? or is it reality.
Honestly, I expected a lot more negative pushback on that post from the Motte, which I do think of as a relatively tech-positive community. Calling Anthropic a 'doomsday cult of autists' made me laugh (if anything I want to protest on the basis that it's not fair to lump perfectly innocent autists in with 'AI' people), but the whole rationalist community is at least adjacent to that cult.
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Well, the only way out of capitalism, that doesn't involve replacing big macs with eating grass to survive, runs through building an AI capable enough to simulate the economy and coordinate economic decision-making (this was already obvious in 1970). It's really a mark of the deep intellectual unseriousness of leftists that they're freaking out about Current Thing AI instead of scheming to align it their way.
If we can reach post-scarcity by becoming vegetarian, then I am more than willing to make that sacrifice. That seems way better than trusting the people arguing for LLM's.
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Great Substack piece. I was impressed by the locals, though not sure that they're right. Also struck by the construction guy who shakes his head at others' failures to integrate new technology: On the new sites, the robots won't replace his guys, they'll be supervised by his guys. Unspoken: maybe there will only be four of his guys where there might otherwise have been 50, but hey, he's a supervisor, it's about the same to him either way. I'm not against AI but it would be very very helpful, the piece has made me realize, if tech firms built a data centre or two around SF. They haven't because they can't because building in the city that is the heart of tech companies and tech employees is for some reason impossible.
No, it wouldn't. Case in point: San Francisco has several data centers already (e.g. Digital Realty's SFO10, SFO12), and people keep on repeating the meme that San Francisco doesn't have any data centers.
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Firstly, you're absolutely correct that the water-use and land-use arguments are bullshit and i don't think anyone local really buys any of it, the people making the decisions, that is the local government, chamber of commerce, land-owners, Et Al. are fully aware of how much land and water agriculture uses, and they are used to playing hard-ball when it comes to negotiating the terms of that use in a way the the typical Silicon Valley VC guy is not. I suspect that the water argument is aimed more at urban liberals than anyone else. That said the power grid and associated infrastructure concerns are entirely legit, local communities have either been burned or seen others get burned too-many times to trust in mere promises.
This is exacerbated by the sort of cultural differences you describe with things like NDA's, for someone who's already kind of expecting to get shafted, trying to swear them to secrecy is only going to reinforce that impression.
Finally there is a more general anxiety about AI as an industry, but rural anxiety about AI is a very different beast from urban AI anxiety, Francisco the fruit-picker and Paul the plumber aren't worried about Claude the chatbot stealing thier jobs, or imenentizing the eschaton/singularity they're worried about folks at Anthropic shredding books while trying to enact the villain's plot from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (or more realistically) they're worried about Flock cameras being used by thier cultural enemies to identify and hunt wrong-think.
I agree. Rural communities correctly believe that their local government will absolutely shaft them in return for short-run gains, and data centers pattern-match to that hard - and in many cases probably are tech companies trying to shaft the community by promising the local government short-term gains. I'm not sure how to fix this except for tech companies explicitly targeting governance trust/quality in their location decisions.
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