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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.
One thing about data centers I keep hearing is that they don't meaningfully contribute jobs to the local community, and I'm not sure why this would be, relative to any other commercial project of similar scale in a given community. Even if the compute on these servers are being used at some arbitrary location on Earth that's completely unrelated to the data center, that specific server needs to be installed, maintained, upgraded, replaced by someone who is physically there. In the long run, sufficiently cheap AI- or remote-controlled robots could replace this, but we're not there yet and I don't think that many people think it's around the corner either, like how so many people seem to believe AGI or even ASI is right around the corner. That person who physically checks on the servers and fixes or replaces it when something breaks or upgrades it just when faster hardware is sufficiently cheap and available to make economical sense would almost definitely live near their job at the data center, and so either that person would be a local or a local import who would spend the money the data center company pays them buying stuff and services from local shops. This seems exactly analogous to any other job of e.g. being a baseball stadium clerk or a warehouse worker.
Yet data centers get talked about as if they're just big slabs of compute that these AI companies build and just place somewhere for other people to be bothered by, never to require paying humans to actually maintain or upgrade the thing. Do these data centers require less jobs or less paying jobs on a per-dollar-invested basis than other similar commercial projects to such a great extent that they can be rounded down to zero? If so, what if we mandated that data centers provide make-work jobs to the local community where people are paid to stand watch to maintain computers that need 1000x less maintenance than they can provide? I've sometimes thought that, given the sheer complexity of the code and tools AI is capable of generating, which far outstrip the ability of any human or even possibly team of humans to understand, and the fact that AI lacks agency or the ability to be held responsible, every company in the future would eventually have precisely one and only one employee, whose job is just to sit around watching the AIs that are literally incomprehensible to them and be summarily fired and replaced if anything goes wrong as a result of AI behavior. Give them an official job title of "scapegoat." We could start doing something like that with AI data centers (give them all golden parachutes so that the money flows to the local economy regardless).
Loudoun County, Virgina is the data center capital of the US. There's 50 million square feet of data centers built or being built there.
Despite every hyperscaler, data center leasing company, and major tech company having at least one and often multiple data centers there, only Amazon appears on a recent top employers list in the county. And Amazon operates more data centers there than anywhere else in the US and has significant management of other data centers from there.
Loudoun County only claims 15,000 jobs in the data center ecosystem (meaning not just operations but the jobs associated with building them, too).
An older study (from a time when only 30 million square feet in were in operation) lists 5400 jobs actually operating those data centers and 65% of those jobs being outside the county (no break down of fully remote or commuting from a neighboring county).
Compare that with Witchita Kansas which is a major location of aviation assembly. Sprint Areosystems has a 20 million sq ft assembly campus in Witchita, which employes 16,000 directly.
That's 3x the direct jobs, for 2/3 or 2/5th of the space. If most of those non-county jobs are fully remote, that's more like 10x the local job density between advanced manufacturing and data centers.
You're right in general, but some of it is just that high paid tech workers don't want to live in Loudon County over the other nearby areas. My prior job was for sw infra engineering work on a (first party, non-AWS/GCP) data center in that area, where physical proximity to the building didn't matter for my role but did for people on teams I worked with every day. Our office was in Herndon (Fairfax County, right on the other side of the border), and I lived with the other yuppies in Arlington.
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Yeah, but realistically most places don't have the choice between an aviation assembly plant and a data center. They've got the choice between a data center and some sort of unused land.
Sure, the contrast was just to illustrate the relatively low job density.
The local issue is more about how much tax incentives get offered and how much electrical infrastructure and how well area generation can supply the new electrical demand. Sometimes land may be better for everyone except the local politicians.
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