One under-discussed topic is whether Americans hate data centers in their neighborhoods, or whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.
I think the “in their neighborhoods” thing is really the key. These things have got to be poison for property values. Younger, less wealthy people have economic anxiety about AI for fear of displacement and oppose data centers on that basis - more data centers = more AI. Older, wealthier people have less intrinsic reason to oppose the technology. But anything that threatens property values, be it a data center, a jail, a landfill, et cetera, must be resisted at all costs.
<p><pre><code> whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.
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<i>Or</i> the increased pollution (air, light, <i>and</i> sound) from having a warehouse-sized building of GPUs next to you. I'm already annoyed by my neighbors having spotlights pointed at their own houses or leaving garage lights on through the night that shine in through my bedroom windows.
Im wondering why the typical design is a warehouse with horizontal sprawl . Wouldnt it make sense to go vertical up or down .<p>Smaller footprint if insidea a metro area by having a skyscarper type data center , as i recall AT&T used to have such windowless anonymous buldings scattered in some cities for their equipment.
Or have a Silo type structure going down if in a more rural area to not blight the landscape.With added advantage of dampenig on the sound pollution (although not sure what effects a humming underground building will have on subterrerean life).<p>Probably cost? All those would cost more that the biz are willing to spend , while putting up four walls and a roof is ordeers of scale cheaper.
Coming from a construction family, the saying oft heard saying was "it's more expensive to build up than out". Also, zoning codes can set limits on how tall of a building can be built. Four stories is a common limit which also happens to coincide with the max height for a timber construction is also four stories. If you're out in the 'burbs, you probably wouldn't want to see a random 10 story boring windowless concrete building sticking up somewhere.
Definitely cost although your idea does sound more attractive. A small footprint much further away from the boundary than normal. You could even make them look nice but since demand is massive and timescales so long, I think anything that might take longer is a "no".
It's cheaper to build out rather than build up. Datacenters are mass dense so building up requires thick floors and supports for the upper floors.
At least in my part of the US, the datacenters built (and planned) are not running their own gas generators, but are just as hated here as they are most other places due to the other adverse impacts they have.
Aren't all DC equipped with gas generators as backups? And they have to run it for an hour every quarter to make sure they work?
I don't really think it's about the adverse impacts.<p>That one in utah everybody hated was gonna be built in an empty valley. There would have been no impact to neighbors because there weren't any, and no impact to the grid because they planned to build their own nuclear power plant.
Are you talking about the Box Elder County Stratos project? I did some digging into that. AFAIK, they are mostly going to be powered by a natural gas pipeline. I haven't heard of them using nuclear. Got any links?<p>It is in a remote valley. And, it's going to use less groundwater than the previous use of the land. The only things to really complain about are huge amounts of gas consumption and AI bad. If the locals pinned them down to building out solar and mini-nuke power, the only thing left would be AI bad.
They are being built to support an industry which is itself an adverse impact.
Would they hate them as much if they were in a Chinese neighborhood? Why not build in China? We say there's not much jobs here anyway, and that it's all negative externalities.
And also their electricity bills rising because of datacenter power demands.
People are going to assume any data center project will have all the worst possible qualities. And a this point I'd say they're justified given how much dishonesty and corruption has been flying around. I don't envy any company that's being open and taking steps to mitigate issues because all the others have caused this hostile environment.
The typical inhabitant of a town that is a good candidate for data center construction is suspicious of authority, hates big tech companies, has heard AI is coming for their job, and consequently not a supporter of data centers, regardless of how they're powered.
I'm sure there are various reasons why specific individual Americans hate data centers, but in the aggregate I think the main unifying force is that Americans hate the rapidly growing (and already larger than the gilded age) wealth inequality that is making their lives shittier if they don't already own significant capital.<p>At a national level, the political establishment is doing nothing useful to fix this problem and is instead making things much worse. Many people are very upset about this, but it is is going to take years to fix this problem electorally (though I do believe it is possible for this to happen, given all the recent evidence that giant political money spends on status quo candidates are increasingly not working and arguably starting to have the opposite effect of being toxic for the candidates who receive them).<p>Data centers are a flashpoint of leverage where the rightfully pissed off populace has the ability to use local political power to take a stand and throw a wrench into the system today rather than 2/4/6/8 years from now.
I hate that I am subsidizing the power bills for these data centers.
> One under-discussed topic is whether Americans hate data centers in their neighborhoods, or whether they actually just hate gas turbine generators running 24/7 in their neighborhoods.<p>Actually, Americans hate Silicon Valley and AI, the data centers are just a concrete proxy: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jasmine-sun.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...</a>:<p>> It’s A.I. as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.<p>> And I think that’s also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It’s not just: It’s going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers.<p>> ...<p>> And what happened? The data center developers sued Saline Township, a town of, again, a few thousand people, saying: Wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can’t have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant A.I. data center developer, they just settled.<p>> They were just like: Fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools, and this fight is not worth it to us. But that, to people, felt like a profound violation of little-D democracy.<p>> It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is: You have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politicians. They don’t tell anybody else what’s happening. The politicians aren’t allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision-making process, and they themselves work out a deal — a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side — that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality, into the world that these tech companies have decided for you.<p>> And so I think that the data centers, in that sense, are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that A.I. is showing up in their lives.
That Saline datacenter is the one I live closest to. I actually know a couple people who live right next to it. The above is basically what happened, but done in the open after that first lawsuit, to the tune of "do what we say or we'll sue you into bankruptcy and then get our way anyways".<p>Mist recent, the datacenter's cost has shot up to ~50 billion, fow which they decided they wanted a tax break of 50% for 12 years, and it was granted using the same methods.<p>also, they named the datacenter project "The Barn" as an extra slap in the face, like look at how quirky and rural we are. I would actually have more respect for them if they had named it "Fuck You Saline".