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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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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.

“Small communities don’t have the legal budget to negotiate well. You’ll never hold a company to a contract,” said Cathy, who feared Janesville once again tying itself to a single big employer—especially one in a “high-risk industry” like AI. City officials were promising to lower wheel and property taxes on residents, but that assumes everything goes right. What if the project gets abandoned? How does Janesville avoid “another GM plant scenario”?

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.

"I ask the three what they envision being built here instead, but don’t get much of an answer. I suspect that Adam is partly right—maybe this is a choice between a hyperscale data center and a concrete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab."

Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.

In 2017, the Village of Mount Pleasant, Racine County, and State of Wisconsin offered over $4 billion in tax incentives and infrastructure investments to win a bidding war for a Foxconn plant. In return, Foxconn promised Mount Pleasant—population 26,000—a $10 billion investment that would create 13,000 jobs making flat-screen TVs. The village eminent domained the land and prepared infrastructure. But Foxconn kept downsizing their plans, citing high labor costs. By the end of 2024, just over a thousand jobs had been created. Mount Pleasant was saddled with over $183 million in debt that Foxconn and Microsoft are still servicing.

The memory of the Foxconn fiasco is still raw. We heard it referenced in conversation after conversation as a flaming symbol of corporate failure.

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.

My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.

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.

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.

Surely there's a town with a data center they can go ask how good it was for them?

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.

IIRC YouTube spends a surprising amount of processing power transcoding uploaded video, to the point where Google has developed custom ASIC hardware to do so.

I guess I don't know how AWS lays out their physical locations, but "all EC2 hardware in one building" would extremely computation heavy, whereas S3 would not be. But perhaps they're intermingled for some reason. AWS and Google also have a lot more institutional experience building these things, which probably smooths out some of the wrinkles.

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