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Long time listener, first time caller.
The war on AI datacenters (and normal ones as a bit of collateral damage) has been going on for a little while now, with those opposed fiercely fighting a lot of these projects pretty much wherever, whenever. It seems to be one of the most bipartisan issues facing the country right now and those who are pro-datacenter have been effectively politically slaughtered. As of a few days ago though, there seems to have been a small little flash point in the thing. I haven't really seen a thread here about this (although definitely could have missed one), and I'm actually a little surprised at it since I do think this is probably one of the biggest culture wars in America of this year. Anyway, curious thoughts on this, etc
From what I can tell, the flashpoint was yesterday when Axios reported (and later posted) a letter from the Ohio RNC to AI companies effectively calling being pro-datacenter politically radioactive. It kinda exploded at this point over Twitter and later Greg Abbott put a thing out about it yesterday after enacting a pause earlier this month. Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country
The reaction to these things are incredibly understandable. Their argument effectively goes "they use our water and electricity, provide a service to enhance the surveillance state and the interests of Big Tech, their proponents openly admit that they're gonna take your job, they bully communities, and they don't even pay taxes either, all the while poisoning the communities they leech on with pollution and noise." Personally, I'm honestly quite surprised that political radioactivity is the biggest thing that has happened so far. This seems to be an issue that unites people regardless of political party or affiliation...
...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods. Polling against datacenter construction is incredibly poor, arguably being worse than coal or nuclear power plants (yeah I know, different surveys). I think this, if I were to pin a spark on this (there are many), it's the story of the Memphis xAI datacenter and also the lawsuits against Solon Township to effectively bully them into allowing the project. Communities, seeing what happened there and politically, have somewhat backtracked quite a bit where before they were much more open to it. Some of those that haven't are proactively enacting outright bans
If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.
Both Altman and Amodei screwed up public perception big time, although I don't think it's 100% their fault. I imagine though this is basically because they're put in a double bind. If it isn't absolutely economy ending for every other company, the trillions pumped into their valuation will vaporize faster than you can say "AGI," but people tend to believe (correctly so) when someone threatens them (and have especially checkered pasts as both these guys do), that their threats are genuine, so when those PR puff pieces trickle down to the public at large.
The All In guys have tried to pin this on Amodei in particular, but I think some people just see that as them talking their book
They've tried to label the opposition as "China," but that clearly doesn't make much sense given that the problems are genuine. Cremieux has tried to take up the mantle on the issue, but I think people see his arguments are seen as specious and as relying on theoreticals that don't match observations on the ground, and this has I think backfired
Expect to see more bans and moratoriums happening across the country. Will be interesting to watch. Thoughts?
Building on some observations I've seen made elsewhere (that data center/AI types need to learn how to earn loyalty in local communities), I think that AI datacenters would have people clamoring for them if their argument was as follows:
Unfortunately I'm not sure that the nascent small modular reactor pipeline is robust enough to make such an offer economical yet.
If your bringing your own power, the US does have huge tracts of land in various places with little to no residents to speak of -- granted the stereotype of this being sun-blasted desert is not altogether wrong, but there are plenty of places with normal climates where you can literally just buy a bunch of land and start doing stuff. I guess some proximity to users is desirable, but I regularly use 'datacentres' (AKA AWS servers) that are physically pretty far from me, and the latency doesn't seem like it would be a big deal from (say) Montana to SFBA?
Coming soon on Yellowstone -- Sam & Dario move to Bozeman and compete to lease the ranch from Chief Rainwater; Cowboys & Indians with Rationalists!
(BRB, calling my agent...)
Extremely low latency is what you want for serving customers but it doesn't matter much for training or infrastructure tasks. But you do need a LOT of bandwidth regardless, and I don't know if it's practical to provide that to the blasted (or unblasted) bits of nowhere.
Fibre is cheap compared to nuke plants (or even transmission lines) -- failing that, I know a guy with a pretty nice fleet of satellites...
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This is a neat scenario, but recall that the current reality is that data centers create a great deal of additional demand for electricity, which raises prices. I agree that an easy solution would be for data centers to loudly and publicly pay well above-market rates that subsidize other businesses/residents, but it does not seem to be the case. In the data center heavy Mid-Atlantic PMJ, for example, approximately half of the large increase in rates is from data center demand.
Precisely, that's why I think flipping the script and making each data center a net electricity producer would be such good PR (and also just generally a good thing.)
But this would cost data center owners money. Are they actually going to do this?
It also costs them money (at least in opportunity) to not have data centers built.
Probably not.
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Nobody is going to be clamoring for this once you say the word "nuclear". People are terrified of nuclear power; they think every plant is a Chernobyl waiting to happen.
That's a separate problem, and possibly the most divorced public opinion is from reality on almost any topic out there.
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I suspect that there are places that would be perfectly happy to have SMRs. I doubt opposition is equally distributed.
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Remember: the average Western citizen is so bad at risk management that they'll gladly support a currency devaluation of 30% to avoid the worst of a bad flu season.
Correction, they'll gladly support a currency devaluation of 30% to create the perception of avoiding the worst of a bad flu season.
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Nuclear power plants now have a higher standing in public opinion than datacenters.
As they should, CMV.
Nuclear power should be at 100% approval, so it's impossible that datacenters should rank higher.
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Is this a sarcastic point about how much everyone hates datacenters, or are nuclear plants genuinely getting more popular?
So, nuclear power, at least according to these Gallup polls do seem to be getting more popular somewhat (37% for "more emphasis" in 2013, 46% in 2026). Using this one because it's the one that I can find on hand that has a timeseries
However, I do think their general point was related to the fact that datacenters have, according to the Heatmap News polls referenced in these graphics just have terrible polling (15% show any type of support, with strong support at 4%), compared to the energy polling they did which shows 44% support (with 21% being strong support)
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They are genuinely more popular now. See Cremieux's post linked above:
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2090182398247858595/photo/1
62% of people object to datacenters, 57% to nuclear power plants. And 27% of people would support a datacenter being built, while 34% would support a nuclear power plant.
Cool, thanks for linking.
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As somebody who lives near a few data center build outs, this would be a massive improvement over the current stance from the builders and municipal governments, which is "go fuck yourself, peasant".
I think often companies would do much better in the long run if they embraced a pro-community pro-public attitude, by which I mean tangible things that benefited the community they happen to be in and reliable, steady employment, not giving an employee match to random nonprofits.
Which is, ironically, the steelman of "company towns".
Of course, the problem with that is that (stereotype of these places aside) unlike towns of old built around resource extraction using significant amounts of unskilled labor, data centers require minimal amounts of skilled labor.
It wouldn't occur to them to build or rebuild the town in which they locate the data center. They wouldn't even know what to do with one.
Add a workplace cafeteria paying $30+/hr. Add some nice grounds taking a few full time gardeners.
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I might be being unfair, as I have not been tracking this closely, but it doesn't even seem to occur to them to hire local. Sure, datacenters only create a few jobs, but you still need landscaping, grounds, maintenance, security, and all of those plus ground-level IT work can probably be had by hiring a local management company or contractors. And you can make it very clear you intend to do this by getting them all on conditional contracts or just asking them their prices. Starting with "I will hire you as soon as the city council makes up their mind" rather than waiting to see what the city council decides to do is the sort of thing that changes the dynamics in your favor.
The IBEW, at least, is upset at the New York moratorium. I assume they're more upset at the missing construction jobs than anything permanent, but when as many data centers are planned as proponents dream about and opponents fear, such jobs can be expected to be available for a long time.
But little of the data center opposition is about this. It's nice for the opponents that data centers create few permanent jobs, but most of the opposition is pure irrational fear stoked by propagandists.
I think this is right, but they pretty obviously increase electrical load pretty dramatically, and providing their own power just seems smart, both to preempt criticism and to secure a long-term supply that isn't reliant on market fluctuation. Plus, it's more secure.
I'd also be want to look very closely into how they planned to acquire their water if they were asking to build one near me, not because I think water disappears when it evaporates, but because we happen to have preexisting water management problems in my area and a massive open-cycle facility could be expected to make those worse. Obviously that's not going to be a universal problem, but it is a real one in some places.
Nobody who opposes data centers would support them if they brought their own power.
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No and fundamentally it’s because people can’t act rationally on issues. The human brain just doesn’t have enough horsepower to analyze the veracity of those type of statements when there are 100’s of things going on in the world today. You just don’t have time to analyze if the outside tribe is going to do something that ends up fucking you. The outside tribe is also the people who promised you “just gay marriage” and you got “inch time pride and chopping off your sons penis”, the same people who have some responsibility for closing the factories, the people who told you Hunters Laptop was from Russia, the people who dumped Somalian migrants in your home town, etc etc.
It just becomes an easier mental modal to assume whatever they promise will end up hurting you. The truth is on most issues humans need to run things on vibes. The other side can hire people to spend all their time figuring out how to make arguments while you have limited time to research issues.
I don't think you're correct in this case. If SMR tech was good enough that the above could be economically promised, I think it would be very effective. Cash talks. I live in the sort of place that people would like to build a data center and I know how they think and it's not particularly hard or expensive (in the big scheme of things) to countersignal those things you are talking about.
I don't bet but I actually would put skin in the game on this one, if you're a data center constructor frustrated by local sentiment in a rural area in the United States and you want help with PR, my DMs are open.
I don’t understand the anti data center view and mostly take Trumps support. The water arguments seem false to me. I don’t understand energy but it does seem like they use a lot. I am mostly just commenting on vibes and the vibes being we don’t trust outsiders I can understand.
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