> In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
The Great Salt Lake is already disappearing and likely to create massive toxic winds because of all the toxic waste dumped into it. Using up that water faster is not a good thing.
When I look at the total number of acres in a state and the number that may get taken up by a data center… not that we should even have to look at this spec but still not sure why people are so focused on data center construction as an issue unless it’s literally going to be next to your house, is there anything more than FUD going on here? And perhaps people taking advantage of it specifically as a talking point given election season.
When people hear datacenter they think ai-almost universally subsidies by the many for the few. They drive up electrical costs, increase carbon emissions, and are designed to make money by stealing and repackaging the fruit of human labor and thought, with the goal of ultimately replacing it not for the benefit of all, but for the benefit of the owners of that datacenter.
> the Stratos development would have spanned tens of thousands of acres in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley. The project would ultimately require up to 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters.
I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
I think part of it is the perception that real environmental and public health damage is being done for totally trivial and indefensible causes. A data center is not like an airplane parts manufacturer, which has lots of ugly pollution but provides a necessary national service. Most people use generative AI recreationally, and the productivity gains among white-collar workers are awfully ephemeral. And if you're less pessimistic about the economics of generative AI... that makes it worse!
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
The problem is not the center per se. The problem is the power. And, all too often they make up for the lack of utility capacity by putting in their own noisy generators.
You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
A few months ago the founders of the top AI companies walked into Capitol Hill. Tried to explain to a room full of elected representatives exactly how their technology was going to put almost half the working population into under/unemployment and they should consider UBI [0]. Then they went back to the airport, got on their corporate jets, and went home secure in the knowledge that they really showed them. That they were the smartest people in the room.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
Out here in the US southwest, we absolutely do care about water usage as well as the potential for higher electricity prices. We also care about jobs, which in the case of data centers are only going to be boosted temporarily until construction is finished.
Plenty of people care about their power bill. Water in some regions is a hot political issue. Data centers don’t create jobs of course, we don’t need anyone to answer that.
"Some regions" being a a bit of an understatement, the US west and southwest are experiencing (or about to experience) severe water shortages and disruption due to the current water shortages.
Lake Mead is projected next year to be at its lowest level since it was filled by the creation of Hoover Dam. The states on the Colorado River have been fighting over the dwindling water for decades. Locals care about water.
I'm local-ish to Box Elder county in Utah, here people absolutely give a shit about the environmental burden to the region. It isn't just about water consumption, but other things. I think the "We need to win China is AI" narrative is (appropriately???) falling of deaf ears. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but even lay-people in my circles have asked how these alleged AI_driven benefits (fighting cancer, stopping climate change, and whatever) are really going to come to fruition, when what they really observe in their backyards are data centers being generated so we can fill our lives with AI slop.
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
Box elder is particularly egregious. 9GW of new natural gas burning power concentrated in 1 location in a state that already suffers from poor air quality.
More electricity than water around here—rates going up gets everyone’s attention—but there’s nothing supposedly about the water use: data centers don’t consume the water permanently but they still put stress on systems which weren’t designed for the extra volume, pushing requests for expensive expansion projects, and there can be other problems: a colleague mentioned his family back home recently learned that the extra water circulation was spreading a groundwater pollution plume substantially faster, affecting well water users in the area. Since these things tend not to contribute many jobs, there isn’t much to balance out the bad news for communities.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.
* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems
* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.
* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.
I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
> I think it's less about what data centers are and more about what they represent.
I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.
Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.
I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.
I think it's a fool's errand to believe populaces resist data centers, or take up issues in general, for any of the rational reasons you listed. It's propaganda using m
legacy/social media to fuel movements. The only question is who the propaganda is from. The boogeyman guess would be China but i honestly have no clue. Either way, when you engage most of those against data centers, their positions are generally baseless (not that the anti data center movement is without merit - its just most of the movement is not in it due to rationality or logic)
Utah is looking at 3 gigawatts to start and 9GW when operating, the state uses 4 GW, and they are choosing to tell residents that their service will be shut off to support the datacenter.
You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind of life. Which is not the elected representatives problem if it happens to happen more than 4 years into the future.
More of a lot of things. Universal healthcare (as opposed to employer-provided plans) encourages people to start their own businesses. UBI would be similar, but moreso.
We currently have a not-insignificant population living the UBI dream. No job, section 8 housing, food stamps, free healthcare via going to the emergency room for everything and not simply not paying, as well as other social programs.
What great art are these folks producing since they aren't burdened by having to work to survive? Mumble rap on Soundcloud? Shitty graffiti on every building?
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
It's the local v. federal thing. The US has been suffering from this for a while, as has Germany. The EU, too, is suffering from this.
The local politician's thinking is thusly:
- Datacenters are going to happen somewhere. And when this inevitably occurs, jobs everywhere, including here, will disappear. There is nothing I can do about that. It's as baked into my assumptions about the near future, as is the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow.
- If I allow the datacenter to happen here then while the builders are here they might buy some stuff locally for the build, and after they are done, the datacenter will employ literally a handful of people to guard and maintain the place. Not much of a gain, but, hey, the alternative is that I have nothing at all.
In other words, the 'competition' aspect between states / bundeslander / EU countries is causing these entities to race to the bottom together.
The solution is... not to do that. As somebody living in a country that doesn't suffer from this particular malady (The Netherlands, which does have provinces, and provinces work in reverse from states: The only rights they have are ones explicitly allotted to them by the state; The Netherlands is not a 'federation of provinces', whereas the US is a 'federation of states', Germany is a 'federation of bundleslander', and the EU is a federation of countries).
It means a province in The Netherlands cannot just offer a would be major company some ridiculous boon to come settle in their province at the cost of other provinces, because provinces in The Netherlands do not have the right to dictate e.g. tax rates, and even any infra project they would do requires permission (and funds) from the 'federal level' (the country).
It's been going on for ten years and there have been nada, zero, zilch solutions to the problem. Thus my stance remains: You have to put a stop to that. The problem is, of course, this requires an entity that currently has some power (namely: states / bundeslander / EU countries) to voluntarily give up power to the federated entity that sits 'above' them, and it's always difficult to convince an entity with power to voluntarily relinquish it.
Most people I know (in Utah) are predominantly concerned with the pollution and water use. Water is the most ubiquitous concern across politics in Utah. No matter what political ideology you adhere to, water rights and water conservation are a core topic. If you watch local news for more than an hour or two, you will see propaganda to "slow the flow". One of the most common criticisms of our Governor is that he publicly prays for rain, while using an incredible amount of water on his own alfalfa farms.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
Why is water so inexpensive? Shouldn’t the price per gallon increase exponentially? It seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult to come up with curves so that typical households pay very little for water and the big users pay a lot for water.
Because you don't pay for the water, you buy the rights. Water is treated like an infinite source with a limited flow rate, and the source itself is sold as property.
The solution is not to price water as a commodity, either. If we priced water high enough to disincentivize waste, we would create an incredible burden for regular people. Water should be as cheap as possible, and at the same time regulated to guarantee an amount of conservation. People who can afford to more than double a state's power grid capacity, all for a single data center, can afford more water than the populace can afford.
What we need is to regulate water use generally so that the watersheds and ecosystems we rely on can be reasonably conserved.
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
Presumably Suzie also serves the people in her community who want tanned skin but don't like the sun. A data center offers nothing of value to the community it's embedded in - neither jobs nor any useful product or service. All the benefits accrue to the owners, and the very real costs are paid by the people breathing in the fumes from the gas turbines, or paying an extra hundred bucks a month for power.
If you don't understand why people don't want them, you're probably trying not to. It's not that hard.
A data center offers software development/infrastructure where people know it or not. Just because they aren't the first order users doesn't mean it's not beneficial. How is a machine shop beneficial to 65 year old Janet?
>So? Since when is there a floor for the number of jobs a business has to create?
There doesn't have to be but since when is it not in a municipalities ability to make determinations as to what kinds of business can operate within its jurisdiction?
I have zero faith in the current generation of gen AI. I think the claims are overblown and the odds of massive unemployment is near zero.
Even if the AI bubble pops, the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers. I don’t care if a data center developer/speculator loses their shirt. The data center will stand long after they fold and someone will operate it.
Build it here. Create the construction jobs. Collect the property taxes.
The US needs to build out energy infra like China, already >2x more total generation capacity (~1/3 of world total). Putting data centers aside, if America wants to bring manufacturing back, it will need energy to build things. RE: data centers, we do need to be more mindful of where they go and the resources they consume. We should force them to use water efficient cooling (more expensive for them) and support the buildout of the required energy gen. Utah does not seem an appropriate place for such a large data center.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
All people (should) have the right to vote. If you don't like they way they vote, persuade them. This culture of political domination is at the core of our issues.
This is a pretty predictable reaction to the underhanded tactics being used to try to force these projects through either before citizens know they're happening and often, when citizens are aware, against their will.
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
We do muster this kind of vigor. The problem is that coverage decisions shaped by negativity bias ensure you're much more likely to hear about the projects people don't like. Did you hear about the huge New Mexico wind farm, largest in the US to date, that came online two weeks ago?
That's true, but I also see a lot of infrastructure projects that get gummed up or even canceled by NIMBYs, industry incumbents, and general obstructionism that would've happened had they been undertaken with the same bull-in-china-shop approach these datacenter projects tend to take.
You get the same vigor against all of those project all the time. Windmills, solar, nuclear, rail, etc. There's a stronger will to oppose than to build.
In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers. I'm sure there are market failures going on here in many places but it's not necessarily the case that you and the companies be on opposing sides. There are positive-sum solutions to a lot of these problems, if people are willing to consider them.
Don't all states have public utility commissions that regulate electricity provisioning? I don't know if the market has much to do with anything since it's all government regulation.
being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.
for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.
so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.
effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
The problem is that we don’t correctly price pollution: it’d be one thing if this boom meant acres of solar panels and wind turbines getting greenlit but in practice it means keeping some dirty plants online and building out new pollution capacity, sometimes completely illegally like what happened in Memphis.
All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
> Just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line sits dozens of unpermitted gas turbines that power xAI’s Colossus 2 data center while releasing smog-forming pollution, soot, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde. The tech company set up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences.
New is heavily solar, yes, but there’s still too much natural gas and the administration is deeply committed to returning the investment fossil fuel companies made in the president’s campaign so I wouldn’t bet on that continuing.
What’s more of a concern is coal being kept online just for data centers. Even if the national average drops, that’s a regional health risk where it happens.
> In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers.
The same should apply to memory and GPU manufacturers and yet I have seen no commitments from them to increase supply, so the end result is that consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive compared to even just a year ago. That doesn't feel like a working economy to me.
This is an unusual comment to read because many manufacturers are public and therefore have released their expansion plans to shareholders (and therefore the public). Most recently, Micron is planning to build much more because their clients have made purchase agreements to 2030: https://www.aol.com/articles/micron-just-locked-100-billion-...
> The hyperscalers building AI infrastructure are willing to pre-commit to HBM and DDR5 capacity through the decade because they cannot afford a repeat of the 2024 shortage.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, the article makes it seem like all that new capacity will be reserved for AI infra, not consumer electronics or personal computing, which is what my comment was specifically about. Happy to be proven wrong if Micron has said anything about reviving the Crucial brand or Sony committing to lowering console pricing because they (or their memory supplier) secured capacity.
It's already speeding up medical progress, so it'll probably take roughly however much time it takes for you to be personally affected by something that is currently incurable.
Thanks for the response, but unfortunately "common sense" is not a source.
And unfortunately, these aren't actual examples of medical progress being made. AI in some capacity is absolutely going to be helpful for medical research, but I'm still very skeptical LLMs are what is going to do it. I also do not think all the other BS coming with the current LLM wave outweighs the benefits. I think the reaction would be much different if these things weren't conflated, and if the focus of AI was towards things like medical research. As it stands, it comes off more as a coping mechanism / excuse that I do not think is convincing for most people when they see the majority of AI is used for garbage (to put it lightly).
They are literal proof of medical progress being made by LLMs. Luckily, your skepticism carries no weight. The applications of LLMs are incredibly wide because it is an incredibly important technology that has evolved its way to where it is from machine learning research that has been ongoing since the 1940's. That's why all of the robber barons are doing all of the typical robber baron things that they always do when a world-changing technology that everybody is going to be using comes along.
The thing is that YOU can actually choose what to focus on at any time. You have clearly chosen to not focus on the STEM work being bolstered by LLMs that will accelerate as the technology does, to a degree in which I literally linked you research papers that support my claim and you hand-waved them away because they are in direct conflict with your preconceived notions.
If it is your belief that AI isn't useful, then as an engineer using LLMs daily, your opinion is laughably uninformed or you perhaps haven't used LLMs since forming it. I also don't understand how anyone can use LLMs extensively and believe that their job is in jeopardy. They cannot reason like a human and they absolutely require a human to pilot them. If people are losing their jobs to LLMs, then blame the follow-the-leader CSuite morons who don't understand the technology as much as you don't, and not the technology.
Tech bros whether they realize it or not are living a philosophy of fear. They say: in order for YOU to be healthy and safe, we should be allowed to trample THEM (the undesirables), because trust us, the end result will be worth it.
Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?
They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.
And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.
Not everyone thinks they will or wants to live forever, and that is assuming they could even afford to get that care. I can't afford to get the best care there is available right now. Im certainly not going to get even better care when my costs go up and my wages go down.
Data centers do more than AI. And you won’t defeat AI by killing data center proposals. The technology will succeed or fail on its own. We’ll find out in about 5 years.
Remember how “everyone” said all trucks will be self-driving in 10 years… 15 years ago?
There are something like 1200 data center proposals cross the US. How many of those will actually be built? How many are being proposed by speculators with no experience building or operating data centers? I have a feeling the number that will actually be built is significantly less that 1200.
Generally, I'm glad that "the people" appear to be pointed in the IMHO correct direction, even if for imprecise, or maybe even wrong, reasons.
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
You think this is reasonable? The person is just trying to conserve their job. It’s an act of self preservation and the opposite of virtue. And it’s not even historically accurate.
It's not really about AI, data centers, water consumption, or energy. Those are real issues. But I don't think that's what gets people so riled up.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.
I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
> AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately.
Source?
Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
> Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not
I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
> All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
Then you should have no problem pointing to concrete examples of how it's actually improved life for the average person.
> I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
If you want to describe anyone with any education as an "elite", go ahead, but it's not convincing and is pretty anti-intellectual.
I sure am glad I'm apparently an elite and didn't know it, though! Who knew being an elite means you're barely able to make rent, will never be able to afford having children, have to forgo medical care due to the costs involved, and would be homeless within a few months if you got laid off?
My mother is fully aboard the "a datacenter ruins the local town" train. She is looking to sell her small farm and move, but she's literally asking AI if a datacenter is planned in every town she's looking into moving to.
Not "is there a datacenter within 500 feet of the home I'm looking to buy" - but anywhere in the county. She just does not have an inkling of the local impact but hoovers up all the doomerism on the topic.
She also doesn't like them due to "billionaires" but the idea that a datacenter makes the surrounding 10 mile area unlivable is front and center. The irresponsible reporting and social media environment has made her terrified of what amounts to glorified warehouses being located a few miles down the road she otherwise never would have known existed. No amount of showing her what they really are (having worked in datacenters my whole adult life) can change her mind.
Honestly, voter backlash occurs for every reason. Build more homes? Backlash. Build more wind? Backlash. Build more solar? Backlash. Build more geothermal? Backlash. Build more urban subway? Backlash. Build high-speed rail? Backlash. What I can conclude from this is that what is right to do and what voter backlash occurs in is orthogonal. I think it is right that we build all these things and more nuclear power, and more residential super towers, and more datacenters, and the other things for the same reason we climb the mountains, fly the Atlantic, and Rice plays Texas.
defending the existing zoning and permitting regime will get your no where with me unfortunately. if we dismantled local control of those 2 things the majority of this countries problems would go away.
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
What's not to like?
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters. I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems
* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.
* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.
I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.
Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.
I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bezos-water-consumption-ai...
> people on UBI are also rather useless
The point of life is not “that you be useful to the wealthy”.
UBI is going to get us a lot more artists of all kinds.
I think the tech bros want to replace artists also
What great art are these folks producing since they aren't burdened by having to work to survive? Mumble rap on Soundcloud? Shitty graffiti on every building?
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
The answer to that is so obviously "no" that I wonder how much attention they've been paying.
The local politician's thinking is thusly:
- Datacenters are going to happen somewhere. And when this inevitably occurs, jobs everywhere, including here, will disappear. There is nothing I can do about that. It's as baked into my assumptions about the near future, as is the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow.
- If I allow the datacenter to happen here then while the builders are here they might buy some stuff locally for the build, and after they are done, the datacenter will employ literally a handful of people to guard and maintain the place. Not much of a gain, but, hey, the alternative is that I have nothing at all.
In other words, the 'competition' aspect between states / bundeslander / EU countries is causing these entities to race to the bottom together.
The solution is... not to do that. As somebody living in a country that doesn't suffer from this particular malady (The Netherlands, which does have provinces, and provinces work in reverse from states: The only rights they have are ones explicitly allotted to them by the state; The Netherlands is not a 'federation of provinces', whereas the US is a 'federation of states', Germany is a 'federation of bundleslander', and the EU is a federation of countries).
It means a province in The Netherlands cannot just offer a would be major company some ridiculous boon to come settle in their province at the cost of other provinces, because provinces in The Netherlands do not have the right to dictate e.g. tax rates, and even any infra project they would do requires permission (and funds) from the 'federal level' (the country).
It's been going on for ten years and there have been nada, zero, zilch solutions to the problem. Thus my stance remains: You have to put a stop to that. The problem is, of course, this requires an entity that currently has some power (namely: states / bundeslander / EU countries) to voluntarily give up power to the federated entity that sits 'above' them, and it's always difficult to convince an entity with power to voluntarily relinquish it.
Still, that's the job.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
The solution is not to price water as a commodity, either. If we priced water high enough to disincentivize waste, we would create an incredible burden for regular people. Water should be as cheap as possible, and at the same time regulated to guarantee an amount of conservation. People who can afford to more than double a state's power grid capacity, all for a single data center, can afford more water than the populace can afford.
What we need is to regulate water use generally so that the watersheds and ecosystems we rely on can be reasonably conserved.
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
A 1GW DC would have to employ 75,000 people if that’s an acceptable ratio.
If you don't understand why people don't want them, you're probably trying not to. It's not that hard.
There doesn't have to be but since when is it not in a municipalities ability to make determinations as to what kinds of business can operate within its jurisdiction?
Even if the AI bubble pops, the world isn’t going to need fewer data centers. I don’t care if a data center developer/speculator loses their shirt. The data center will stand long after they fold and someone will operate it.
Build it here. Create the construction jobs. Collect the property taxes.
Eat while there’s food.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB (Adam Tooze prezi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
2020 - 79 : 20 (renewables : fossil fuel)
2026 - 57 : 42
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/04/03/americans-shi...
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
Future Illinois data center tax breaks on hold - https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-br... - June 25th, 2026
State Data Center Policy Shifts as Governors Impose New Restrictions - https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-cente... - June 22nd, 2026
Gov. JB Pritzker suspends tax breaks for data centers, urges more discussion - https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-susp... - June 5th, 2026
Which States Are Banning Data Centers? - https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-ce... - June 2nd, 2026
US tax incentives for data centers by state - https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04c...
Tax Incentives for Data Centers 50 State Survey - https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentives... [pdf]
being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.
for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.
so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.
effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
Do you trust these tech bros to be truthful?
> Just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line sits dozens of unpermitted gas turbines that power xAI’s Colossus 2 data center while releasing smog-forming pollution, soot, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde. The tech company set up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences.
https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
What’s more of a concern is coal being kept online just for data centers. Even if the national average drops, that’s a regional health risk where it happens.
https://www.powermag.com/power-demand-from-data-centers-keep...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
The same should apply to memory and GPU manufacturers and yet I have seen no commitments from them to increase supply, so the end result is that consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive compared to even just a year ago. That doesn't feel like a working economy to me.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, the article makes it seem like all that new capacity will be reserved for AI infra, not consumer electronics or personal computing, which is what my comment was specifically about. Happy to be proven wrong if Micron has said anything about reviving the Crucial brand or Sony committing to lowering console pricing because they (or their memory supplier) secured capacity.
And I suppose that depends on whether I die first from not having access to healthcare after AI takes my job.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.25329104v...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11326321/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
And more just a Google search away.
And unfortunately, these aren't actual examples of medical progress being made. AI in some capacity is absolutely going to be helpful for medical research, but I'm still very skeptical LLMs are what is going to do it. I also do not think all the other BS coming with the current LLM wave outweighs the benefits. I think the reaction would be much different if these things weren't conflated, and if the focus of AI was towards things like medical research. As it stands, it comes off more as a coping mechanism / excuse that I do not think is convincing for most people when they see the majority of AI is used for garbage (to put it lightly).
The thing is that YOU can actually choose what to focus on at any time. You have clearly chosen to not focus on the STEM work being bolstered by LLMs that will accelerate as the technology does, to a degree in which I literally linked you research papers that support my claim and you hand-waved them away because they are in direct conflict with your preconceived notions.
If it is your belief that AI isn't useful, then as an engineer using LLMs daily, your opinion is laughably uninformed or you perhaps haven't used LLMs since forming it. I also don't understand how anyone can use LLMs extensively and believe that their job is in jeopardy. They cannot reason like a human and they absolutely require a human to pilot them. If people are losing their jobs to LLMs, then blame the follow-the-leader CSuite morons who don't understand the technology as much as you don't, and not the technology.
It's like being mad at trains in the 1830's.
Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?
They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.
And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.
Remember how “everyone” said all trucks will be self-driving in 10 years… 15 years ago?
There are something like 1200 data center proposals cross the US. How many of those will actually be built? How many are being proposed by speculators with no experience building or operating data centers? I have a feeling the number that will actually be built is significantly less that 1200.
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.
I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
Source?
Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
> Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not
I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
Then you should have no problem pointing to concrete examples of how it's actually improved life for the average person.
> I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
If you want to describe anyone with any education as an "elite", go ahead, but it's not convincing and is pretty anti-intellectual.
I sure am glad I'm apparently an elite and didn't know it, though! Who knew being an elite means you're barely able to make rent, will never be able to afford having children, have to forgo medical care due to the costs involved, and would be homeless within a few months if you got laid off?
My mother is fully aboard the "a datacenter ruins the local town" train. She is looking to sell her small farm and move, but she's literally asking AI if a datacenter is planned in every town she's looking into moving to.
Not "is there a datacenter within 500 feet of the home I'm looking to buy" - but anywhere in the county. She just does not have an inkling of the local impact but hoovers up all the doomerism on the topic.
She also doesn't like them due to "billionaires" but the idea that a datacenter makes the surrounding 10 mile area unlivable is front and center. The irresponsible reporting and social media environment has made her terrified of what amounts to glorified warehouses being located a few miles down the road she otherwise never would have known existed. No amount of showing her what they really are (having worked in datacenters my whole adult life) can change her mind.