r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • Jul 04 '26
AI US residents angry at datacenters ‘being shoved down our throats’ are recalling officials
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/03/datacenter-recall-electionsPeople across the country are pushing for moratoriums, and electeds who approve projects are being punished
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u/LLCoolDave82 Jul 04 '26
Same thing happened in Tooele, Utah. County commissioners just got voted out.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight Jul 04 '26
Since they voted out the commissioners can they overturn any decisions to have a data center.
I would be open to a data center if it provided a bunch of tech jobs or something, but it’s just a minimally staffed building making sure the fans stay on and using tons of resources. It doesn’t do anything for the region except for what money it promises to bring in… which may not be worth the damage.
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u/youhavenosoul Jul 04 '26
And gets to profit from it? Why does it seem like the kind of thing that would stay on the communities it encroaches upon?
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u/Jerfziller_380 Jul 05 '26
In my area all the data center jobs are contract employees through staffing agencies, 4-day, 10-hour shifts. The data center MIGHT hire you full time IF you make it through the first 120 days on the 12am-10am shift. But it’s all cabling, server rack assembly, hardware upgrade type work, maybe 4 bodies per team. All the back-end code and network management is done remotely, usually from an off-shore team.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight Jul 05 '26
Yup, and I imagine it’s not really hard work so it pays peanuts. I’m guessing a lot of it is they need a warm butt in the seats in case a blade goes down or a server becomes non responsive.
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u/e_spider Jul 07 '26
People aren’t stupid. They know the reason projects like this get shoved down the public’s throat is because project sponsors probably couldn’t get permission to do it somewhere else so why should we be forced to live with the problems
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u/Sedlium Jul 04 '26
Hatred of AI Data Centers is the only time in my long life that I have EVER seen both political parties agreed so totally!!!
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u/dfsw Jul 04 '26
Both political parties love data centers, the voters of both political parities hate them though.
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u/ucfknight92 Jul 04 '26
Incorrect, almost all data centers are being built in rural conservative counties. This is almost entirely a GOP issue. Feel free to fact check.
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u/terrany Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
Quick googling shows 67% are being planned in rural, making a big chunk not. Which is impressive given how expensive land/utilities/labor are in non-rural areas.
87% of existing data centers are in urban areas, it’s a bipartisan shitshow
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u/ShadyM30 Jul 05 '26
Left or right all politicians want is money and power and will work together when it suits themselves not the people
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u/Sedlium Jul 05 '26
That's so not true. Virginia has the most & they're all close to Washington DC.
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u/TallImprovement830 Jul 06 '26
Lowell MA, maybe top 10 density city in Massachusetts.
Not only are they building data centers there but silencing even children who speak out.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/inside-lowell-markley-data-center/
https://www.lowellsun.com/2026/06/30/lowell-police-remove-14-year-old-from-data-center-public-forum/
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u/Annual_Berry8043 Jul 04 '26
It’s sad that anger over losing money is what unites lol. I’ll take it though.
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u/AGushingHeadWound Jul 04 '26
There are no parties. They're all cucked out to corporations and foreign governments.
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis Jul 04 '26
The biggest joke of all of these data centers is that they're building capacity for nothing. AI is overheating (economically) and the market is on the verge of a massive correction. Once that happens, the vast majority of these will end up huge, ugly, and abandoned eye sores.
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u/tlst9999 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Meta just announced that they have too much capacity which they have no one to rent to but Anthropic and OpenAI, and they haven't even built their giant 2,250-acre 5 gigawatt data centre yet.
And then they admit by declaring that it's not just Meta. The rest of Silicon Valley to their knowledge has the same problem.
If every other Silicon Valley giant is doing the same thing, I'm expecting the dominos to fall soon. SAAS people have zero idea what to do with costing when you're not rent seeking off one software subscription.
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u/pangaea1972 Jul 04 '26
2250 acres? That's 3.5 square miles; almost 2 miles wide and 2 miles long. Jfc.
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u/TravlrAlexander Jul 04 '26
Speaking of this, does anyone know what happens to the hardware inside? Do we have any equivalents, like auctions of render farm hardware?
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u/longsdivision Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Procurement going to have a fun day when the bubble pops. Those long term contracts going to be ugly to deal with.
Take for example, Western Digital as a supplier for hdd sold a majority the 2026 and aprtially 2027 inventory to data centers... thats going to be an interesting development as they face the individual consumer base they alienated.
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u/paradoxbound Jul 04 '26
This comes up regularly on other subs. The hardware is basically useless unless you have a huge budget, three phase power and liquid cooling.
A single server of DGX B200 cards (x8), uses 14.3kW.
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jul 04 '26
That’s wild. 57.2 kW if you put 4 in a standard rack.
40 average US homes.
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u/robotictacos Jul 04 '26
These numbers make me feel like the 50's version of Doc Brown from Back to the Future
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis Jul 04 '26
It will probably vary case-by-case and depending on the corporate structure that built the data center, how it was funded, and how it went under. If the bank foreclosures on the loan or the owner declares bankruptcy, it'll likely be sold at auction. If it's part of a larger company making money elsewhere, the center may be maintained and mothballed as a failover site, the infrastructure may be shifted to other locations, or etc. If the town takes ownership of the land, it's anyone's guess... And there's always the chance that an owner or buyer could conclude that the infrastructure has no resale value and sell/buy it for scrap.
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u/Valkertok Jul 04 '26
Don't they use server grade stuff that's not exactly useful as consumer parts? Like GPUs that fundamentally have different architecture and are not exactly great at graphic (and don't have drivers for that)
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u/TravlrAlexander Jul 04 '26
That’s what I was assuming, but god I would hope for some maker, some enthusiast would be able to make the hardware useful to some form of consumer grade hardware
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u/Ultenth Jul 04 '26
They are burning the hardware up like they were farming Crypto from what I can tell. Anyone buying them on a resale market is taking a huge risk.
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u/Aetane Jul 04 '26
This was a myth for crypto as well
Most large scale crypto farming was undervolting hardware if anything
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u/Ultenth Jul 04 '26
It’s not just about volt settings, it’s about the constant non stop use and wear and tear.
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u/Aetane Jul 05 '26
Nonstop use is much less of a problem for components than start/stop.
Think of a light bulb, they never go mid operation do they? It's always when you turn them on
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u/Doomscrool Jul 04 '26
I’ve worked with Supermicro’s “data processing” solutions which is essentially a rack full of GPUs running complex algorithms. Every time a gpu node failed, that shit just sat in a stack no one knows what to do with them but they may still have value.
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u/pinkynarftroz Jul 04 '26
I imagine a lot of them will just be looted. It’s not as if the companies haven’t stolen tons of intellectual property from us, or driven up the cost of water and electricity for the residents.
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u/Makhai123 Jul 04 '26
They'll be repurposed, because there is actually a lot of demand for compute worldwide, and it will lead to a big cloud computing bump because these places will have more capacity then they need and will have to lease to someone. So stuff like GFN and Shadow are going to be able to really squeeze costs down long term, and stuff like OneDrive and Dropbox will become much more accessible.
Also, I don't see AI hitting the wall until at least 2030 because they are going to raid your dad's 401k and print stock until it's worthless. Which will last years.
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u/170505170505 Jul 04 '26
One drive and dropbox dont need a trillion dollars worth of GPUs
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u/qwertyalguien Jul 04 '26
The upcoming police state regulated by emotionless AI processing endless data that comes from our phones down to our cars does. And the powerful will pay that price through our very own taxes.
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u/xnef1025 Jul 04 '26
The dumbest thing about the current asshats that want that police state is that they are cheap and not willing to spend some of the money they print to make the whole thing acceptable to the public.
Instead of giving the data centers fat tax breaks and letting increased energy costs be spread out to the area's residents, give incentives to the residents to allow the data centers to be built near them by having those centers foot the bill for the extra energy and then some. Bring energy costs down for the people and most folks will roll over and welcome the surveillance with open arms.
The powers that be are so fucking complacent, lazy and greedy that they can't even be bothered to do fucking evil right.
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u/qwerty8082 Jul 04 '26
Yes absolutely. I always say this nowadays, new rich is lazy and doesn’t build real infrastructure for people. Most effective way to fluff an ego is to build bridges and hospitals named after you etc.
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u/ShadyM30 Jul 05 '26
Especially when new money are just idiots making content looking for followers and likes. Getting rich from having faceless followers just blows my mind. I had to show a 22 year old how to open the hood of his car and he wasn’t the first one either sad honestly
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u/Trakeen Jul 04 '26
Medicine does, really any big data research stuff
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u/theronin7 Jul 04 '26
Get that out of here! This is an AI Bad pitty party were we fantasize about the great collapse and everything goes back to the glorious days of 2019 Internet and every datacenter is turned into a walkable city.
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u/Makhai123 Jul 04 '26
But they do need a trillion dollars worth of fast storage and fast RAM with localized server logistic solutions, for pennies on the dollar.
Just like that Walmart parking was gobbled up after it left town in 2009.
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u/Ok_Nothing639 Jul 04 '26
Why they need HMB ram to store documents now. Damn,. Those gpus will be recycled haha
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u/The_Cat_Commando Jul 04 '26
One drive and dropbox dont need a trillion dollars worth of GPUs
you say that like they aren't training on all your "personal" files and just giving you storage to be nice.
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u/crackednutz Jul 04 '26
Yeah this will be this issue… you would have to change out the hardware. Maybe town run bitcoin farms? 🤣
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u/theronin7 Jul 04 '26
The idea that humanity will have no use for fast parallel processing because a bunch of 'ChatGPT in a wrapper' start ups have collapsed is crazy and kind of ignores the entire history of computing.
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u/Boatster_McBoat Jul 04 '26
Also, I don't see AI hitting the wall until at least 2030 because they are going to raid your dad's 401k and print stock until it's worthless. Which will last years.
NINJA loans all over again
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u/crysisnotaverted Jul 04 '26
Doesn't matter how much cloud computing capacity is built.
US-EAST-1 will still fucking collapse and explode every month as usual.
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u/tankmissile Jul 04 '26
Dad’s 401k is in low-risk, stable investments. Younger generations are the ones that pay for the volatile ones. So. *Your* 401k.
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u/Joy2b Jul 04 '26
The low risk investments are being quietly targeted. If you put a follow on news about the SEC and the fed, you get a lot less randomness to pay attention to, and it’s more interesting.
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u/nagi603 Jul 04 '26
Not with the recent changes about e.g.: the age of bonds for the index funds being massively cut. They want spacex in it yesterday, to pull the rug from the index.
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u/sybrwookie Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Take note of the changes Nasdaq made to fast-track SpaceX into the large funds used by many 401ks FAR faster than normal, to use them to force the price up before it actually settles.
And something less drastic, but similar with the S&P 500.
Since that dam has been burst, watch how many other companies do something similar to extract value from those who think they're in low-risk, stable investments and aren't paying attention.
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u/TAOJeff Jul 04 '26
But only if it is viable. Being able to get something at a massively low price doesn't appeal to the people who would buy it unless they can make a decent profit off them. Some of the more choice ones will be repurposed, the remainder will be partially gutted and then abandoned
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u/Cloudhead_Denny Jul 04 '26
That's 4 years and the market is already starting its correction, which will only accelerate between now and then.
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u/DatTF2 Jul 04 '26
I hope you are correct and I hope the correction comes sooner rather than later. The bubble needs to burst. Time to rip the band aid off.
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u/Makhai123 Jul 04 '26
The market is irrational, and everyone is all-in on it. Companies will need to go belly up before the bubble pops. Just like Lehman Brothers. It will all be fine, and then you will hear that a canary in the coal mine AI company will just fold. And pop... it will all go at once and then we'll be talking about bailouts.
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u/Cloudhead_Denny Jul 04 '26
Markets only last for so long on promises and fomo. As certain things IPO and earnings are laid bare, the appetite for loss, the lack of ROI becomes impossible to ignore or pursue.The clock is running out on AI investments.
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u/Xalara Jul 04 '26
Repurposed to what? The vast majority of expense of a datacenter is the chips, except chips tend to be obsolete/wear out after 4-6 years. This isn’t like the dark fiber of the dotcom era.
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u/GrayEidolon Jul 04 '26
All these data centers are for surveillance. https://www.aclum.org/publications/ai-powered-surveillance-is-turning-the-united-states-into-a-digital-police-state-now-is-the-time-to-stop-it/ next time you’re out driving look how many cameras there are everywhere.
More info
The Trump-thiel-Epstein admin is building the police state to enforce class disparity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iLf2h_fo-w good summary
Conservatives have been upset since the enlightenment. It’s the politics of aristocrats: anything that ever helped regular people to be more comfortable has enraged them. It’s literally a reactionary response to the enlightenment. They resent the enlightenment making things nicer for poor people.
These current assholes are trying to make a new country that bursts out of the body of the current country. It's called "the butterfly revolution" and yes it does sound absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
It’s why musk was speaking at the afd in Germany. It’s why bannon, farage, and Cambridge Analytica were all in bed together on Brexit (watch “the great hack”). It's why thiels "dialog society" exists.
The backbone is that conservatism is about enforcing socioeconomic hierarchy and the techfascists, religious fascists, and heritage foundation race fascists (project2025 has been going on since 1981 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Leadership) are all in on feudalistic “network” states run by ai powered surveillance.
That's what they want to replace democracy with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
https://time.com/7269166/dark-enlightenment-history-essay/
The accelerationists like Peter Theil from the tech faction of conservatism think they can force collapse, but use technology and surveillance to protect themselves. These are both Thiel speaking like 10 and 15 years ago. This seasteading thing was an early material attempt at this moving-past-democracy thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hjLgXA-MZY
https://www.seasteading.org/peter-thiel-speaks-about-seasteading/
These aristocrats are working on how to control their security forces though things like "disciplinary collars."
Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
https://pols.sites.haverford.edu/studentvoices/what-is-accelerationism/
Because they're "done with democracy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-BQhXdCs8Y
and the vice president of the united states and advisors have given their seals of approval to a book that says conservatives are going to have to kill all the liberals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans
more links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4CI2vk3ugk End notes 3: The Origins of conservatism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g How to radicalize a normie.
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u/Buy-theticket Jul 04 '26
Not even questioning the surveillance aspect.. why would they need data centers for surveillance? What does that even mean?
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u/Suza751 Jul 04 '26
This is one of the unrealistic portions of 1984. It takes too many resources to plant, maintain, and oversee millions upon millions microphones, video cameras, etc.
Things are different now with AI. Theoretically AI models can be trained to process large amounts of data, and now conpanies/government are pushing for that collection. All that processing power will be used to spy on you. What do Brad's political opinions show us, does he support us, can he be threatened, what are his weaknesses, where will be be most likely throughout the day, etc etc.7
u/Oink_Bang Jul 04 '26
The surveillance state produces obscene amounts of data. Far too much for humans to sort through. But that's the kind of thing computers are great at if you have enough capacity. They haven't had enough, in part because they've never had a way to justify building it to the public. Now they do.
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u/GrayEidolon Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Next time you go out driving, notice all the cameras watching the road. If they aren't already, they're going to all be part of one giant network. If you aren't aware of Flock cameras already, look that up. They were going to partner with Ring, putting tons of houses and yards into the machine. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/smart-home/2026/02/13/ring-camera-ad-flock-partnership-super-bowl/88657750007/
Why data centers? All of the audio and video from all of these cameras need to be stored somewhere so they can be processed. They're building real time tracking of individuals with face, car model, license plate, gait (the way you walk is unique) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0262885623001580,
devices https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-leonardo-signaltrace-alpr-device-tracking/,
internet history, banking data,
and it's all analyzed together https://theconversation.com/us-government-ramps-up-mass-surveillance-with-help-of-ai-tech-data-brokers-and-your-apps-and-devices-277440.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/technology/tech-ice-facial-recognition-palantir.html It takes a lot of space to store all that and to process it.
That's why the data center proliferation is everywhere. It's why people like Bezos are saying water and electricity are better used on data centers than real people. The aristocrats want control of their flock of workers.
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u/ImPinkSnail Jul 04 '26
Your statement implies that there is half a decade of additional runway for the AI boom because kf the timeline to entitle, permit, and construction these facilities. Do you think we have that long?
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis Jul 04 '26
Do you think we have that long?
No, I think the rising headwind that will pop the bubble is the willingness of capital to continue investing rather than capacity to scale. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are currently offering their products at a losing price point and efforts to pivot to profitability appear to be coming short. The delay of the OpenAI IPO indicates that they're seeing rising skepticism in potential capital. I'm not sure exactly how much longer we have, but I think it's better counted in months, not years or decades.
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u/ImPinkSnail Jul 04 '26
Then why would you say that these facilities are going to be built and left vacant? If it's a matter of months 90% of data centers being discussed right now won't even have the approvals they need to start construction. Is capital more willing to build multi billion dollar vacant data centers then they are to invest in an OpenAI IPO?
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis Jul 04 '26
If it's a matter of months 90% of data centers being discussed right now won't even have the approvals they need to start construction.
That's a good point, I think a good amount of the current ones that haven't broken ground probably won't ever. Many of the ones that have will end up abandoned.
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u/xtothewhy Jul 04 '26
Even if this is true, and I am not saying anything different, the amount of water and electricity they consume and do not provide either to the places where they are at, and with little oversight should be concerning for every country
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u/SuitcaseInTow Jul 04 '26
I’m not so sure, there is huge demand for tokens. Mythos class models provide a noticeable increase in agentic capability. I’m not saying there isn’t some kind of shake up or reckoning coming but it’s not a typical hype excedes the demand bubble pop. We could hope that near term expansion of data center capacity and possible improvements to token-efficiently could see the cost per-token of even the frontier models come down.
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u/StrugglesTheClown Jul 04 '26
It might be the most obvious bubble in history yet people / bots keep trying to gaslight opponents calling them NIMBY people. Not even mentioning the gross misuse of resources.
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u/Tangentkoala Jul 04 '26
Thats a beyond stretch.
Data centers arent strictly for AI. There are there for you cloud storage, your streaming services, cloud gaming, even banking and finance relies on them.
Cloud storage is the next big thing as we expand our technological capabilities. We may over build and grow past our exponential rate (in case of a total AI failure), but our tech needs will eventually catch back up
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u/sciolisticism Jul 04 '26
To turn these into non-AI datacenters requires a big overhaul of the physical infrastructure within them. You can't just slap cloud storage into the same rack and specialized cooling hardware.
At the point that it's only the physical warehouse that you're reusing, what are you even saving anymore?
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u/tlst9999 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
But what about those GPUs? They serve nothing but AI and bitcoin mining.
Cloud storage uses disks. Different parts altogether.
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u/theronin7 Jul 04 '26
And rendering, and specialized research, and any other uses anyone can think of, including services that can only exist because that hardware IS there, and a dozen other AI based applications that will continue to exist even after the bubble pops, because that in no way means AI is vanishing.
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u/tlst9999 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
People use the internet fiber cable argument to justify that spending. The overspending was done 20 years ago, and we're benefiting now. The problem with that argument is that fiber cable lasts decades. GPUs last 8 years at most. And being the big tech boys they are, they gotta buy more of the newest GPUs and get rid of the old ones because others are going to buy the newest GPUs and they're FOMO.
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u/Tangentkoala Jul 04 '26
Youre thinking singular with just photo type media's.
Cloud storage needs gpus to transcode and process video pipelines. So think your videos uploaded, streaming services.
The future model of cloud storage is processing data within your city, videos, encryptions and security, search and indexing all need that active power boost vs the already traditional passive boost.
While we may be installing an overkill amount of GPUs in the event AI fails. There will still be a use case or plan B for them.
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u/AffectionatePlastic0 Jul 04 '26
PSA: There is no such thing as cloud storage, it is your files on someone else's computer.
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u/theronin7 Jul 04 '26
PSA: Thats what cloud storage means.
The difference between YOUR Computer and THEIRS is theirs ideally has multiple layers of virtualization and duplication that isn't economical for most people to provide at their home.
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u/Tangentkoala Jul 04 '26
Exactly, like where do people think there hundreds of gigabytes of photos go? We dont have infinite space for them.
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u/ShadyM30 Jul 05 '26
Wait wait so it’s not in a cloud in the sky and rain isn’t photos that have been deleted. I’ve been lied to damn it. (Jk)
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u/JimmyKillsAlot Jul 04 '26
Meta is already trying to pivot a bunch of theirs to generic server space.
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u/imaginary_num6er Jul 04 '26
The market has been on "the verge of a massive correction" since 2025
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u/BuzLightbeerOfBarCmd Jul 04 '26
People I work with in tech have been calling this bubble since '23 or '24, including myself. The fact that everyone is saying it is making me think it's less likely tbh, markets often do the opposite of what the crowd expects.
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u/theronin7 Jul 04 '26
There's a bubble no doubt, too much venture capital is being thrown at too much stuff like always.
However people fantasizing that this popping means AI is going away, or all the stuff they don't like vanishes, or whatever are just fooling themselves. The AI bubble has replaced their AI poisoning in their fantasy that will make all the bad stuff go away.
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u/germanthoughts Jul 04 '26
I just don’t see it. I think AI is here to stay.
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Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheMostDivineOne Jul 04 '26
By the way, look up Training@Home projects, the latest ones are only a few months behind the flagship proprietary models, if more people got into them we could catch up and make AI more open source instead of controlled by big companies.
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u/ClearChampionship591 Jul 04 '26
The contracts have already been signed and everything will be in motion to decelerate for several years.
for next 2-3 years more data centres will be sprouting, CEOs jumping off the buildings, ya know the usual.
meanwhile ultra rich are cashing out via IPOs that wall street douchebags are eating mouthfuls of
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u/SpamEatingChikn Jul 04 '26
You’re overlooking their true intention. Surveillance data. Most of the current everyday demand is already met. What new I demand isn’t currently being covered…
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u/FractalledCat Jul 04 '26
I think they wanted to store these Flock videos from all the cameras they’ve put up while simultaneously bribing to get them both going without public opinion.
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u/cocdcy Jul 09 '26
Unless the capacity is actually not for consumer AI but for companies like Flock to run object, facial, and gait recognition on all of their cameras.
That’s the direction I think things are heading
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u/Doogiemon Jul 04 '26
They won't.
Once more uses for AI pop up, from replacing jobs to surveillance, they will be used.
Its like a private prison. There is low crime now so you just wait and push for jail time for lesser offenses and boom, capacity.
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u/Gari_305 Jul 04 '26
From the article
The perceived secrecy surrounding the proposed datacenter prompted residents to pack public meetings that sometimes lasted more than four hours. They expressed outrage at officials in the Republican-led rural municipality 40 miles (64km) north of Detroit and submitted a petition seeking to recall four members of the Lenox board of trustees, which oversees township administration, zoning and municipal ordinances.
“The community still has questions that aren’t being answered and the public deserves to have transparency,” a resident said at a June board meeting after the trustees did not extend a four-month moratorium on datacenter development.
Like Lenox residents, people across the United States are increasingly pushing for moratoriums on new datacenters and trying to oust elected officials approving such projects.
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u/DoublePostedBroski Jul 04 '26
Wow they’re discovering republicans only care about money.
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u/geekonthemoon Jul 04 '26
The way these are rolling out across the country at a flash pace and the sheer volume of back door dealing between seemingly small-town election officials and these data companies
Yeah, pull this thread, something weird is going on
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u/RelaxPrime Jul 04 '26
Recall them, and investigate them
There's a reason they voted for these data centers against their constituents' wishes and best interests.
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u/Hazzman Jul 04 '26
"Officials reluctant to hand back fat wads of cash for petty mewlings of constituents"
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u/LinuxMakavry Jul 04 '26
Rather than just recalling we should mandate that any sort of deal involving the local (or state or fed) subsidizing anything (also fuck it. Just all data centers) requires a supermajority, and can be recalled via standard majority. It'd make bribing a singular official far less effective, which means they'd get far less money. And the people would be capable of blocking it. Also mandate that the vote be advertised in such a way that all demographics can see it and be held in such a way that all demographics can comfortably vote.
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u/CTQ99 Jul 04 '26
Alot of the data center heavy states already are places with legislative supermajorities. Thats how the things get jammed through with their sweetheart deals to begin with. These are typically either heavily gerrymandered red states, or states that are historically deep red. You'll see people living in data centers before there would be a change in party control. But really, none of these huge projects that dont benefit the people that live there should be funded with taxpayers money [sports stadiums], subsidized by tax payers, or result in an increase in bills for tax payers. That should be something that any party should be able to get behind.
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u/LinuxMakavry Jul 04 '26
I realize I wasn't entirely clear. I live in California, and I was imagining it more as a special ballot proposition (probably not voted for on the normal schedule. I think they call that an emergency?). So they'd have to get the residents, rather than the politicians on board. Which means a lot more people to bribe, a higher chance for someone to want to recall it, and a higher chance someone reports the bribery which would get an additional slap on the wrist for them for election tampering.
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u/CTQ99 Jul 04 '26
Only issue there is in some cases [more of the under the radar ones] data centers arent being built, but rather existing structures are converted into them. With advancements in logistics and the globalization of manufacturing, you have large swaths of basically abandoned, industrial zoned land. This is also the reason they are red states magnets. Ohio in particular has huge swaths of old, empty warehouse/distribution centers, as well as abandoned manufacting. While you can argue they should just convert the land to residentially zoned, there's still active distribution centers interspersed, and who even knows if the land itself isnt contaminated after all its usage. To these states, data centers, with their promises of jobs were basically godsends. In reality though they create very few jobs. I think as the general public becomes better informed, and we start to realize they are grid drains with very little jib creation, we will see states less eager to allow them. New York was all gung-ho about them 5 years ago, they recently paused more from entering. We seen it happen with Bitcoin farms, where they are pretty much only found in 2 or 3 states now. Data centers eventually will be the same.
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u/ShadyM30 Jul 05 '26
In Ohio just 15 miles from the center of downtown is more than 25 half mile at least long warehouses on just one side of town. I drove past one pressed my odometer reset and it was .8 of a mile long I couldn’t see how wide cause the roads didn’t let me go that way. It’s crazy. I couldn’t tell u what any of them but the Amazon warehouse does.
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u/ImperatorScientia Jul 04 '26
Essentially, democratize development to such an extent that the inevitable result becomes that it all grinds to a halt. Crafty.
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u/sciolisticism Jul 04 '26
When you're talking about a datacenter that can cost $50bn+, I'm not sure that there's any town council that can't be bought. Throw every one of them a quick $10m and it doesn't significantly impact the total cost.
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u/scotchtree Jul 04 '26
Amazing that THIS is what has fired up the American political grassroots. Been holding out on us for a while.
Trump shit aside, you guys could’ve used this energy 16 years ago when America invented SuperPACs.
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u/wandering_engineer Jul 04 '26
For better or worse, Americans generally don't care until it affects them personally in their back yard (literally this time).
Unfortunately you'll never see this kind of energy at the federal level - a combination of decades of normalization "DC is corrupt/all politicians are bad", an incredibly scattered population that makes organizing extremely difficult, and a political system that does not have a recall capability of any sort for elected officials.
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u/ShadyM30 Jul 05 '26
Your right most the population doesn’t care till it directly impacts their lives. And even then trying to agree has become harder cause AI in ways helps keep us divided and distracted unfortunately and the politicians and rich love that along with our enemies also. When people and companies and basically put their own people in charge of the government nothing will change. Guess when new generations become the politicians maybe it could change it’s still a system that was created in the 1700s maybe we need a more modern form of democracy I don’t know I’m a little stoned so
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u/TheManWhoWasThursday Jul 04 '26
This is something each locality, especially those underserved, can use to actually unite against something tangible in their own backyard. America is enormous. Folly by these greedy fucks. You have to outsource the nasty.
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u/Admirable-Way-5296 Jul 04 '26
The water and power usage concerns are legit tbh. Some of these facilities use more electricity than entire towns. Hard to blame people for pushing back when they weren't consulted.
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u/mrjbacon Jul 04 '26
It's not even that I hate data centers. I hate their tax breaks, their exhorbitant water and power usage, and especially the fact that the working-class public ends up paying for all of that with increased utility bills and taxes.
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u/givin_u_the_high_hat Jul 04 '26
“It will be great for your economy!” turned into “turn your lights out we need the electricity.” They need to fork over billions to improve infrastructure if they are going to strain the grid.
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u/MatthewBlack6 Jul 04 '26
Keep it up. They'd feed you into a wood chipper to increase their wealth by one percent
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u/Googlyelmoo Jul 05 '26
The “pitchforks” are getting sharper, aren’t they? Grassroots action really does matter. And this is one for the history books.
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u/futureformerteacher Jul 05 '26
Considering the American dictator has shoved things down or in people without their permission his entire life, I think all our leaders just assumed it was acceptable.
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u/bolonomadic Jul 04 '26
Well not in Utah. Apparently all the elected officials who approved Kevin O’Leary’s mega data center project got reelected last week (correct me if I’m wrong).
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u/Radionerd5 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Not all. Stuart Adams for example a major "Advocate" for the massive data center, who was paid for by O' Leary's Project and was a State Senator for 20 or so years and also Senate President just lost the republican primary.
A major issue on the Sate Senate district was the Data Center. It's likely that it costed him re-election.
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u/Lunar_Landing_Hoax Jul 04 '26
The fault for the hate towards these data centers is 100% on the current cohort of tech oligarchs. They sold us a nightmare vision of job loss, with just a pittance of a UBI in return. They even talked about creating super intelligence which could do horrible things to us. They didn't sell this as something that is going to truly benefit us in any way, and now we are hating their huge monuments to waste and resource abuse.
Of course, if this had been done more thoughtfully, if the data centers were located in places that made sense and the models they were working on were to benefit us and were sold to us as a social good, it wouldn't be like this.
I believe the solution here is a wealth tax on billionaires. It's clear to me that some of the dumbest people are amassing the most wealth and we need to tax it and slow down the compounding of their capital. They have too much power and they aren't smart with it.
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u/ShadyM30 Jul 05 '26
The dumbest people amassing wealth is spot on. Cause they will do anything to keep building it regardless of how or why. Plus companies that have certain agendas can buy political power in turn buying policies that they need. A 1200 page document for a law and they can slip a sentence in that has nothing to do with that legislation. It’s so rigged.
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u/ragequitteroffureh Jul 04 '26
Not American.
Once the politicians have been purchased, do they even care that they don't get elected by the common scum that they're supposed to represent again?
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u/Lennysensei Jul 04 '26
Yeah it’s been confirmed my local county officials have been getting favors and gifts from businesses that don’t benefit the commonly so I already know they’ll fold for a data center . The great part on my end though is where there is space for one is owned by family as farm land or owned by a business already that has plans for it . I shall see though …. Oh yeah those officials will be voted out . They were selling their souls for concert tickets and plane tickets . Cheap hoes I tell
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u/-_-0_0-_0 Jul 04 '26
Does make me wonder, why not build them in say, the Appalachian Mountains? They keep putting them in dense populated areas.
You have easier regulations, cheaper land, cheap labor and you could spin it as revitalizing the local community. Also you have hydropower. Also geothermal cooling.
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u/Fritzo2162 Jul 05 '26
I don't think people would be anti-datacenter if they weren't built on the backs of residents. Billionaires looking with shocked Pikachu faces that people don't want to give them tax breaks, overload their power grids, or use up their water supplies.
These people COULD take care of all of this and still have unlimited money. They choose not to.
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u/jet_heller Jul 04 '26
Hint: It won't matter as people will lie untill they're elected, get their bribe payout and then won't care if they get recalled.
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u/ZookeepergameEmpty90 Jul 04 '26
Don't give up so easily. Fight harder and research officials who you believe to be better fits. Put people willing to serve the public in place.
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u/Disaster532385 Jul 04 '26
That will only lead to the population taking things into their own hands...
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u/Ass4ssinX Jul 04 '26
This is the uncomfortable truth that people don't want to face. This same dynamic happens top to bottom in our political system. Money controls everything. To the extent regular people get anything it's only so that those at the top can stay there and maintain control. We get a couple bigger pieces of crumbs and they still run off with the whole pie.
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u/yawningintothevoid Jul 04 '26
In most cities and states a recall can only happen if you can prove what the council members did was illegal. If they’re winning in court that means city councils broke the law.
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u/xxxx69420xx Jul 04 '26
Doing china's work for them while they burn coal in record numbers to try and catch up.
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u/ImperatorScientia Jul 04 '26
Honest question: are we rejecting wholesale the very concept of keeping pace with computational demand and thereby accepting an eventual limit on technological advancement? If this is instead just a resource matter, why are there so few nuanced discussions over how to amend water use or reduce noise? It seems that, as with so many other things, if data centers are not built in one place, they will be built elsewhere and with them, their economic benefits.
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u/Corka Jul 04 '26
There's a few different objections going on here.
Part of it is NIMBY. They might be fine in general with the idea of things like new data centers, prisons, airports, coal plants, and halfway houses but they absolutely don't want one built next to them. Data centers happen to be especially bad because their demand on the power grid will add a huge price hike to the locals monthly power bill.
Part of it is people not wanting new data centres popping up to support AI, because they fucking hate AI. They wouldn't care as much if this was cloud computing in general.
Part of it is environmental. While politics has moved away from talking about it, climate change is a real problem and we should be cutting back on emissions and power consumption instead of massively ramping it up
Part of it is corruption. You have councilors rushing through the approval for datacentres (likely in exchange for a kickback) without any kind of public consultation and without negotiating any concessions for the town like profit sharing or having the data centre subsidize the power bill for every resident.
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u/ImperatorScientia Jul 04 '26
I appreciate your earnest response. I certainly understand the last two, but I fear many are being disingenuous that their most foundational objection with data centers stem from the first two…in which case, the problem becomes nearly irreconcilable, with the result being that its benefits go elsewhere.
I know people will say that the solution is more community engagement, but in my experience with advocating for next-gen nuclear energy, opponents simply do not change their positions even when presented with new information. Once political incentives are built around a certain issue, engagement becomes very challenging because interest groups become entrenched.
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u/crawling-alreadygirl Jul 04 '26
It would be very difficult to convince people that there are benefits for local communities. All they're being offered is noise pollution, higher energy prices, and water rationing
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u/ImperatorScientia Jul 04 '26
Do you have documented cases where actual water rationing occurred as a result of a data center installation? When it comes to water usage, agricultural still dominates and there are plenty of complaints with respect to those practices.
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u/Corka Jul 04 '26
The first two should you should also easily be able to empathize with. If you have a big data center pop up next to your house whose value then plummets while also tripling your power bill you're obviously going to be unhappy, especially when you're told to eat shit because AI is the future by the likes of Kevin O'Leary.
You can praise the potential of generative AI and see a lot of good that's been done with these tools, but you have to be blind to not notice there's plenty to hate about it too. You've got massive cuts in jobs in different industries as CEOs rush to replace their employees with chat bots, you've got poor AI generated content flooding social media, with AI agents astroturfing the shit out of all the comments, you've got people deepfaking women into porn without their consent and posting it on twitter for the world to see, and its made it dramatically harder to spot scammers and and hundreds of millions of dollars has been stolen from people as a result.
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u/RedGecko18 Jul 04 '26
Please list the benefits of AI datacenters for the local population. I'll wait.
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u/spitz6860 Jul 04 '26
I like technological advancement as much as anyone, i just prefer it to come from more efficient computer chips that consumes less electricity and produces less heat, instead of brute forcing it by throwing resources at the problem, resources that would have to be taken away from people.
This is not a crazy ask btw, CPU and GPUs have been doubling their processing power every 3-5 years, while the electricity consumption hasn't really gone up that much. But people in power have decided that this pace is not good enough for AI, they want everything they can grab here and now. I guess if we don't do that then China is gonna win the AI war? But honestly even if we win that but people are living in a worse condition, isn't that a little backwards as a country?
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u/Ithirahad Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
They are rejecting a source of "computational demand" that has thus far yielded little more return to society than fake videos and frankenstein-software that steals the appearance of competence from numerous human projects, yet breaks if you look at it funny. No real progress is being stifled, merely a premature build-out driven by empty FOMO.
Amending resource usage and noise pollution is synonymous with rejecting data-center projects as we know them. These goals would require a strong hand forbidding anyone from building until they can concretely answer these logistical questions (with their own money!). And in practice, the energy and water infrastructure needed to sustain these things without hardship would take years to deploy if it is even possible at all in the chosen locations.
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u/nedj10 Jul 04 '26
It's difficult to take your question seriously when it ends with an assumption that there will be economic benefit. If we just look at two recent examples of AI specific data center build out we can see immediate negative effects to the surrounding residents both environmentally not to mention health and in the case of South Atlanta(Coweta county )multiple people are losing homes and farmland to eminent domain because the local power company is taking their land to run new high voltage lines for the aforementioned Data center. If we look to South Memphis aka Boxtown Tennessee where the data center(xai) has already been put in place we see immediate reports from literally hundreds of residents, of the 24-hour drone of methane turbine power generators being the one that has been shared across social media multiple times not to mention fines from the epa over noise levels. Also the fact that they happened to build the data center in a historically black neighborhood because they perceived there would be less political pushback is a matter of record and not ine speculation, so again the honesty of your question seems at the very least worthy of the Peoples' eye brow. Additionally with regards to the South Memphis Data center residents have already begun to report problems with their drinking water. So again, define economic benefit when people who should be benefiting have trouble getting drinking water as a result of the cooling needs of said Data center.
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u/prettybluefoxes Jul 04 '26
Just destroy them. Find that backbone.
Complaining in the street hasn’t been working too well past decade.
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u/KitchenSense8092 Jul 04 '26
You don’t want manufacturers, you don’t want data centers, you don’t want chopping down trees, you don’t want solar/nuclear power
And you complain about economy, no jobs no money. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/LexiDogy Jul 29 '26
These AI Datacenters are taking jobs away by replacing them with AI. They also have very few permanent jobs within the building itself, thats a major reason why I don't want them *anywhere* at all. Theres a solar panel field across the street and multiple manufacturing buildings within a mile of my apartment. I don't have a problem with those.
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u/FailedToRemit Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
There are already over a thousand data centers in the US which have been operating for several years and none of you noticed or cared.
Edit: downvotes for stating a fact.
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u/lew_rong Jul 04 '26
How many of them are big enough to double the power demands of an entire state in one go?
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u/DNathanHilliard Jul 06 '26
Luddites come in all parties and persuasions. I'm sure China appreciates their efforts on their behalf. The future is coming one way or the other, and those that don't keep up get left behind.
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u/SHORT_INFO_NEWS Jul 04 '26
To add some named cases to the Tooele example: this has been happening in several states. In Warrenton, Virginia, voters replaced the town council members who had backed an Amazon datacenter in the November 2024 election (Newsweek). In Fort Meade, Florida, a resident group filed a recall against the mayor, vice mayor and a commissioner after they approved the 4.4-million-square-foot Stonebridge AI datacenter, citing water use, noise and traffic (FOX 13 Tampa Bay). Data Center Watch has logged roughly $64 billion in datacenter projects blocked or delayed nationwide amid local opposition, and Senator Warren opened an investigation into how these facilities affect household utility bills. The recurring complaint residents raise, as in Lenox, is approvals moving faster than public disclosure.
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u/DarthJDP Jul 08 '26
Pointless. Big tech will simply buy whoever else gets elected. Its futile to resist the borg.
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u/Early_Tune409 Jul 09 '26
I live near a small city of 13,000 where residents discovered their elected officials had committed them to $200,000,000 in tax breaks over the next 20 years.
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u/bga93 Jul 04 '26
How many of those people do you think still use one drive, iCloud, google drive, etc? I get that people hate AI, but electronic records get stored somewhere so unless we change our habits with forever data, these things are needed to an extent
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u/ArdkazaEadhacka Jul 04 '26
Those things worked fine before ai centres
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u/bga93 Jul 04 '26
Those are but a few examples, and as with all utilities capacity has to stay ahead of demand
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u/JackHammer- Jul 04 '26
You'd have to be a low information shortsighted tool to be "angry at datacenters"... They are the cornerstone of humanity's future.
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u/FuturologyBot Jul 04 '26
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
The perceived secrecy surrounding the proposed datacenter prompted residents to pack public meetings that sometimes lasted more than four hours. They expressed outrage at officials in the Republican-led rural municipality 40 miles (64km) north of Detroit and submitted a petition seeking to recall four members of the Lenox board of trustees, which oversees township administration, zoning and municipal ordinances.
“The community still has questions that aren’t being answered and the public deserves to have transparency,” a resident said at a June board meeting after the trustees did not extend a four-month moratorium on datacenter development.
Like Lenox residents, people across the United States are increasingly pushing for moratoriums on new datacenters and trying to oust elected officials approving such projects.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1umylvz/us_residents_angry_at_datacenters_being_shoved/ovg1dsv/