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Notes -
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.
I agree, but I wanted to expand on why the deficit involves both trust and public utility. Data centres disrupt the usual tacit bargain between a community and a major industrial project: the community accepts some local costs because the project also creates visible and durable local benefits.
With data centres, the costs are highly concentrated, land, water and electricity use, infrastructure demands, noise and visual blight, while most of the benefits are diffuse and accrue to users, employees and shareholders somewhere else. They generally provide very little permanent local employment, and the companies involved have a history of exaggerating those benefits and stiffing the locals. That makes promises of compensation harder to trust, not just in some general sense but for data centers specifically.
A factory can also impose serious costs, of course, but once operating it normally has an obvious continuing relationship with its community through employment, suppliers and associated economic activity. A data centre is less a reciprocal relationship and more like a company extracting locally scarce resources to produce value elsewhere. So even if people accepted that AI had some public utility, there would still be a separate question of why particular communities should bear a disproportionate share of its costs and why they should believe the promises of the relevant companies that have a history of lies.
I don't think the people involved quite understand scale of the costs they impose and the lack of benefits they give relative to other regular businesses or even doing nothing at all. The issues with data centers aren't something new, recognition of them and opposition too them have been growing for a long time, this rapid expansion just highlights it and makes it a news story.
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