the no data center movement

i think this is a pretty big deal and has a good chance of significantly changing how people vote, especially older people. i also feel like it has a chance of building local radical energy. it has pretty quickly appeared as a powerful venn diagram center of groups with not-completely-congruent values. residents pack town halls, yell and scream, get ignored, the righteous anger builds. many similar stories happening all the time everywhere right now in the u.s.

to start i've got to link this brutal takedown of clown billionaire investor kevin o'leary from two young women in utah regarding the hyperscale stratos data center currently looming over 65 square miles of high desert north of the great salt lake in box elder county.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOVaBDzEAN/

The remote chance of getting a data center in my drought-stricken North Central Florida county is currently being used as an excuse to ignore burn bans and water restrictions by chuds.

Map, this is crazeeee..! the most blatantly anti-democratic thing I've seen in ages

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project

what's interesting about it is how political support for data centers is bi-partisan, even though absolutely everyone hates this shit. "political support" as in the elected and unelected officials (often appointed by municipal leaders) who actually vote on these things and "listen" to the public feedback.

it's a wedge issue among the left, i think, and democrats, very different from israel's genocide in gaza, but a similar effect in that if you oppose data centers, you have little representation at a national level. the "we hate data centers" voice is drowned out by neoliberal technocrat bullshit, looking the other way, passing through data centers and failing upward to the next level of life success

That Utah one is fucking insane. This is where it really starts to feel like the tech oligarchs really do run everything, unchecked (bi-partisan support, as z_tbd notes!) and we are all just fodder in the making.

there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way. It's certainly going to help shareholders and CEOs but I've yet to be convinced, but I am convinced that these data centers are fucked. The Utah thing will use more electricity than the entire state of Utah is currently using

btw fuck Kevin O'Leary and that stupid fucking show that made him a recognizable name

yeah I read the Guardian piece on the Utah center and holy crap the energy and water math on that one is on another plane. O'Leary was quoted in it blahblahing about competing with China, and to state the tediously obvious: why aren't we compelled to compete with China on education funding, transition to renewables, electric vehicles, etc.

Kevin O’Leary had a role in Marty Supreme as well.

cool another reason not to see that shit

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

xp yeah he's also doing that 'paid protesters' bs schtick w/o providing a shred of evidence... that's the new line with these fucks, if there's a mass protest they must be on the Soros econazi payroll because who would *not* want this massive destruction of the natural world for a handful of jobs and some tax incentives?

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

milo clearly getting paid by the post

Also if we want to do something before China, how about green energy?

And yes, people absolutely hate these data centers, with every good reason imaginable. I agree there's the makings of an anti-billionaire populist political coalition there, if only we had a major party interested in such a thing.

yeah I just said the same thing about China and I mean if we're really worried about them beating us, perhaps we should try communism??? O'Leary can contribute to the glorious cause by digging a lithium mine

in stl, one of the many proposed data centers at "the armory" was approved after a last minute voting session (announced 24 hours before the meeting, the bare minimum required) which was switched to a zoom call rather than their regular meeting spot, and passed unanimously. i saw friends scramble to try to get to the physical meeting spot, get to the meeting (at 2pm or something, during workhours), only to show up at the spot and find that it was on zoom. and then of course, very few of the zoom attendees were allowed to speak.

the mayor, on this same day, meanwhile, no joke, was in england at a small dinner party with the billionaire who proposed the data center. on the same day it was being voted on.

later that day the mayor seemed to realize that some people were disappointed in her, so she released a clip where she defended the data center, and with not a small amount of barely concealed resentment against her own constituency, mentioned the conditions the city had boldly placed on the data center to "address community concerns".

but what are the conditions? on energy use:

The Developer must use reasonable efforts to source at least 50% of
the data center’s energy load from renewable sources (wind, solar,
geothermal, etc.) within five years of commencing operations. If the
renewable goal is not met, the Developer must endeavor to purchase
localized renewable energy credits. The Developer must also recycle
e-waste. The Developer must annually report electricity usage, waste
heat, and water usage, which may be made public.

yeah, GREAT

even better, all those jobs!

The Developer must meet escalating, median-wage "Job" minimums for 20 years (starting at 25 in year 1, 50 in year 2, and 100 thereafter) and pay $2,000 in liquidated damages for each job short of the required total.

something tells me that 100 people are not going to be working at this data center. and what is this incentive? if they don't meet 100 workers, and they're deciding what to do, they can either add another worker (ballpark, paying them $50K), or they can pay a $2K penalty. i wonder what the billionare will do?

the other thing that occurs to me: Iran has shown that data centers (specifically Amazon or AWS sites) are legitimate targets for attack... something to think about, it wouldn't have to be a foreign power, it could be a target for domestic terrorists or space lasers

xp the good news is data centers are not going to be built

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is but he’s penciling out that data centers take forever to build and very few have actually been completed and are up and running

Don’t theae data centers become outdated in a matter of years and need to be completely upgraded?

I don't know about AI specifically but there are plenty of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers up & running all over the place

New data suggests that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is operating out of more than 900 data centers, far greater than previous estimates.

As reported by SourceMaterial, citing "leaked" data seen by the publication, in 2023, the cloud giant was operating from some 914 data centers in more than 50 countries.

Right, but AI dedicated ones need far more power and water and cooling space so are far bigger than regular ones

i hope ed zitron is right! the part where it gets way over my head is about how the debt holders of the ai data centers are these shitty ai startups built on a bubble that are likely to disappear. i can see how that would be a problem! however, when it comes to billions of dollars, for some reason it always seems like another group of really rich people always manage to step in just in time to make sure that the environmental destruction of our only home in exchange for short-term private gain continues as long as possible

yeah cloud servers and AI computing centers have very different demands xp

ultimately its all just computers in a room thing thats really different about the current ai boom is scale

i do agree that most of them will prob never be built

yeah I don't know the technical requirements but the Guardian article says that the one planned in Utah will be as large as Manhattan if completed, which is fucking nuts

Musk wants to build them in space which is fine I guess but you would have to have staff living up there and what if the AI goes crazy and locks them out

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/

not sure you could come up with a better bubble indicator than someone trying to build a facility bigger than manhattan

im going to build a tulip greenhouse bigger than manhattan

could be a rad indoor skate part after the bubble bursts

def a cool place for teens to hang out and throw rocks at things

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

2x the size of Manhattan apparently? Two Manhattans. That's too much even for a single lunch date.

speaking of manhattan one aspect of new york city living that bodes well for the future is that i assume building an AI data center here is cost prohibitive (not that i don't think someone will try)

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

What can I say, the people yearn for mysticism. Maybe try to get him to just join a nice cult instead? The Jehovah's Witnesses will take anyone.

I've read some of these fools talking about 'Oh yeah, Claude likes to write poetry in his free time' and I'm just thinking 'you fucking suckers really believe this shit don't you?'

a lot of companies that sounds like fly-by-night operators are proposing a lot of stuff right now but I wonder how much is going to make it past the "we rented a building" phase because the hardware to fill all these places is nonexistent or already spoken for

the thing with these giant wealth funds and venture capital expenditures is that they can bet a ton of money every time with the assumption that one of every five, ten, etc. things they throw money at will show a profit after five years because the profits will make up for the rest of them being failures and it's a matter of keeping the money rolling

yeah I guess part of the worry is when they start building the Manhattan-size building and then run out of money and there's just these giant concrete pads in the desert or prairies or whatever... even an unfinished one can still cause a lot of damage, and declaring bankruptcy can help you avoid cleanup and remediation. Look at all the abandoned oil wells all over the place

I have a free Claude account that I've used very rarely, I mainly set it up to poke and prod at it, and I set my username as "Human." So when I log in it says, "Hello Human." I think it's good to keep those boundaries clear.

does he ever write you poems in his spare time?

I’m not going to make myself popular but…

Hi, I’m building a datacentre and they don’t have to be terrible. My one is going to be water positive, they’ll be a net increase in water in the aquifer under us, renewable powered because that’s the cheapest and quickest way to do it. The waste heat is a resource we’re going to use for horticulture and growing algae for fertilizer, animal feed and aviation fuel.

In Europe there’s plenty of DCs heating neighborhoods with district heating, heating greenhouses etc.

Data centres aren’t the problem, it’s how they are built and the insane amount of money sloshing around AI. A DC will pay upwards of US$50,000/MWh for energy for AI. At this moment in Australia the spot price is AUD103 and it’s a still morning and the sun hasn’t come up yet. The ceiling price in the market is AUD26k. So DCs are massive distortions.

Trump fucked the US by putting tariffs in Chinese solar and batteries - that’s the easiest and quickest way to power anything particularly in the American West. Of course by design that pushes everyone to the next cheapest thing gas, which is terrible, and there’s a global shortage of gas turbine components because the latest generation jet engines break all the time and the turbine manufacturers all have uptime contracts with the airlines and so all parts go to planes.

This means that even worse choices get made; and of course like everything that’s gone before DC operators are not being held accountable for their externalities. The Investor owned utility, I.e. one without a market mechanism is a particularly bad fit for this (not that open markets like Texas are much better) - the incentives are there to fuck one’s neighbors as with Lake Tahoe above.

Of course whilst DCs will pay 50k/MWh they don’t want to and energy = water so will do cooling in the worst possible way and just vent heat and vapour to the atmosphere.

TLDR; datacentres are terrible due to lack of regulation, tech bro god delusions about what AI is and will be and capitalism. They deserve to be fought, they are bad news till proven otherwise.

Well right, I mean we've had big data centers for years — it's "the cloud" — and while there were concerns raised about their energy draw even before the big AI boom, they weren't at this monstrous everywhere scale that is being attempted now. I agree that not all of the centers being planned are going to be built, we're obviously in a gold-rush mentality right now and that can't last.

And yeah the problem is regulation, and that the regulation in the U.S. is being done at local and state levels that are just utterly unequipped to deal with any of it. These local mayors and commissions and state legislators get stars in their eyes when these big tech lobbyists show up and do big power point presentations on "the future" and everything, they actually think this is exciting stuff.

I should try and find an actual source for it but a DC nearly blacked out Southern Company and/or Duke last year. That’s most of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas IIRC.

They switched over to their internal diesel gensets without telling the grid and grids don’t do well when 3GW of Load just disappears like that.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on XAI's big (polluting) data center in Southaven: "This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history. It sets the pace for continued high-tech investments across our state and strengthens Mississippi’s position as a leader in this exciting tech revolution."

This shit makes me want to go all Ricky Roma — "Who ever told you you could work with men? You fucking child."

THANK YOU ED

"We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way.

meanwhile China is so far ahead of us in renewables, the US is gonna be like colonial Williamsburg for fossil fuels (analogy c/o Daniel Bachman)

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

From what I gather, a lot of the boosters are focusing on the people throwing around a lot of dissent at city council meetings, zoning meetings, etc. and pointing out that people haven’t actually read the plans or what regulations will be enforced, and so on. Which is fair, the number of people raising the noise level in the last decade in local politics has been high and it doesn’t help anyone.

I think what they’re missing is that this is the tip of the iceberg of people who have vague suspicions or are finally noticing that the world has changed in the last few *decades* and there is a lot of vague, in-articulated dissent going on because the public at large has become uncomfortable.

The existing outliers that have been poor stewards of land, energy, and labor are in the spotlight and we’re getting a systematic reevaluation of what exactly we’re doing here.

The counter-example of a good site was provided when I questioned someone boosting expansion was a Colorado Springs industrial site that’s had the sort of incoherent pushback I mentioned. I agree it’d be a good site! Abandoned Intel manufacturing plant that was slated to be a solar cell manufacturing plant until the subsidizes dried up and that company pulled out. The issue there in my eyes is that there’s a pre-existing empty building, there’s no guarantee this will work out any better than the solar cell plant, and even if it does it opens the door to more expansion and industrial park crowding.

Some of the more remote locations that are proposed might be fine from nearly every aspect but again, there’s no guarantee that this is long term and creating another rural or semi-rural vacant building is just more rural blight. There are entire empty small towns that are mostly nuisance properties at this point.

you just put some h next to some 20 and you got water, easy peasy especially for specialized nonprofits

I just saw a video of some guy walking through a dry riverbed right by an existing Meta data center, it was just red dust... no water at all

#dustbowl

clean power as in "clean empty"

clean fossil fuel

The nearly $500 million, 366-megawatt facility would rely on 813 small gas-fired generators that don’t require water but would emit pollutants such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.

Real heads (readers of Eddie Z) know that the announcements of center construction far outpace actual data center “completion” and “actually filled with chips and not sailboat fuel” and this is all kayfabe to keep the money, now increasingly coming from public pension funds invested in PE, flowing.

in other words, I’m never retiring and my diet will consist of never used Blackwell chips.

yeah, I agree with that... but in the case of Meta, they're actually building them, not just talking about it like Warren Beatty pulling up to a little crossroads town called "Las Vegas."

this is good but I imagine it only covers actual city limits? still, sends a message

In first, California city overwhelmingly votes to permanently ban datacenters

Residents in Monterey Park, California, became the first in the US to vote on a permanent ban on datacenters on Tuesday, and early results indicate a resounding victory for the prohibition.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments, Monterey Park would be the first to do so through a ballot initiative.

reno too. i'm seeing more flat-out cancellations. i don't think stratos in utah is going anywhere.

reno isn't permanent iirc

oh i missed the last sentence.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments

this seems to be the main thing happening.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/01/ai-data-center-protest-police-surveillance/

Americans speaking out against artificial intelligence data centers on social media are falling under police surveillance, a confidential law enforcement bulletin obtained by The Intercept reveals.

A fusion center in Philadelphia combed through spicy internet comments from AI critics and concluded there is a growing risk of physical violence against data centers from “domestic violent extremists,” ranging from white supremacists to anarchists.

“Domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, posing a physical and cyber threat to infrastructure in the Philadelphia regional area,” the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center wrote in a December alert.

worth noting that Iran took out Amazon Web Svcs data centers pretty early on in their response to U.S./Israeli attacks, so yeah

I loooooooooooove that this shit is catching on to the extent that if you bring up “data centers” in a science conversation you get the “let’s not bring politics into this” reflex

ha

smdh. Droughts and water scarcity in general are intensely political, as they should be. Scientists who want to avoid politics are being willfully stupid.

i am curious about the context of the conversation - was it with coworkers, friends, professional colleagues?

in my experience working for state gov it's funny how silent everyone is about politics. it's such a no-no to talk about. the director of my agency likes to say things in my company that assume that i'm some kind of generic hater of "government red tape." like my beef with government is both a lot more fundamental and much less personal than that my dude.

i was wfh the morning of january 6, and i chatted everyone saying something like "i'm worried" and all i got was an "everything's going to be fine" from an irritating coworker. that was the end of me hearing anything about it.

all i got was an "everything's going to be fine"

Trump has said the same thing almost verbatim about his Iran war and its fallout. it only means "everything's going to be fine with me". Obviously Trump has more reason to think that way than you co-worker did.

this was a conversation my partner was having with colleagues, some of whom are in gov, many not

pretty crazy how quickly anti data center sentiment has permeated american political culture, apparently one of the complaints of these guys who supposedly were going to attack the white house ufc event was data centers, that and epstein, unfortunately one of their moms overheard them talking about it and called the cops

republicans are even running against data centers now in local elections

The Chinese made me do it

Republicans are embracing allegations that data center opposition in the U.S. is being fueled by foreign actors, raising questions over how influence operators are contributing to one of the fiercest debates in the tech policy space.

Reports, including from OpenAI, recently emerged suggesting China and other countries are carrying out influence campaigns to fan the flames of Americans’ frustration with the data center build-out.

great for Republicans to go against their own base

im willing to accept chinese money or store credit

there's just no way this is an organic movement of actual citizens opposing environment degradation and job loss, reports OpenAi

no doubt it’s a hidden plea for subsidies from the federal government

yeah they really don’t seem to understand how much people hate this shit

I think they do know, but they think it's just a passing phase and the public will let go of it once AI is better established as a normal part of daily life. They believe this mainly because it is a convenient belief that suits what they wish were true. So they blithely ignore the growing anger and wish it away.

It’s funny, after i posted i thought to myself, they do know, they just don’t care because they’re toxic narcissist tech elites who will never have to deal with the consequences of these data centers going up.

ngl guys i am actually starting to think a revolution against tech would be yhe best thing for this country

people are simply going to have to [hug & kiss] one billionaire a week until the message is received. garden variety health insurance CEOs aren’t going to cut it. it’ll have to be some real marquee names.

would be interesting

right now the entire state of utah is on fire. i really don't think they're gonna get anywhere with stratos. as far as the intermountain states go, wyoming seems to be the most data center-friendly. cheyenne said yes to a few iirc. not surprising, wyoming people are deeply twisted even by western red state standards.

in Wisconsin they're building a huge one by I-43, which means it's very very visible, it's also stunningly huge. seems to be the conservatives complaining about it the most actually

there was a big AI stock tumble today, investors are starting to get the hives over the ridiculous over-valuations, so we'll see about new construction actually getting off the ground

hope it all crumbles, i don’t have any stock or anything else so i honestly don’t give a flying fuck if the economy crashes, it would just be the third time this has happened in my life

also i hate this shit so much that even if it did hurt me, it would be a small price to pay for seeing the bubble burst

i’ve resigned myself to working until I drop dead (that’s 10 minutes from now).

luckily (!) i have been homeless and lived off grid etc before, so i have resigned myself to working until i can’t and then living on social security in dire poverty. great country.

I know it's stupid of me, that it would be harder than I think it would be, but lately I have been thinking a lot about what it would take to completely check out of this Capitalist treadmill. (And also cheering for its complete destruction as I do so.) Like, it's not just a desire to escape a prison, but to find a better way of living. I often fantasize about communal living, rejecting the internet, adopting "old ways", etc.

Well...you partly can if you're willing to go without plumbing, a fridge, various conveniences for a while, if maybe not forever, while you build or buy alternate systems for things that we currently get from "the outside world." It just takes a lot of intention, attention, energy, people chipping in, conversations and agreements.

on the plus side it's never been easier/cheaper to live off-grid!

I do own stock and my portfolio went up today. The AI/chip decline isn’t as entwined with the rest of the market as banks/real estate was in 2007/8

yeah it wasn't a crash or anything... more jitters about the spending levels

those jitters happened right as i graduated from college, which essentially kneecapped me for the rest of my life, so it was a fucking crash for me

speaking of data centers this shit is insane;

https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-doj-supports-musk-owned-data-center-in-suit-by-naacp/

Xps to pops, i also lived in such a situation for a few years in my 20's. I can't go into detail on ilx but there was no plumbing, heat, etc. It was honestly the happiest i've ever been, and I was never been able to reintegrate myself into the straight world or city life after that. The physical demands were considerable, not totally unpleasant... still, i don't think it will get any easier as i age.
I've often thought about joining an intentional community, though. In the back of my mind that's always been the plan, it's inevitable actually.

Xp table — i don’t think he meant jitters in reference to 2007/08 crash

3 utah state legislators got primaried over data centers, including the senate president stuart adams

https://www.ksl.com/article/51538423/stuart-adams-trevor-lee-dan-mccay-lose-reelection-bids-in-utah-legislature

the stuart adams loss is the only one explicitly about data centers afaict

two incumbent box elder county commissioners also voted out.

i'm a state employee so i get monthly "messages from gov. cox". the one from a few days ago said something like "many people have expressed their concern over data centers. we have a group of people making sure that water flowing into the great salt lake is protected." what the fuck does "protected" mean lol. excellent squirm language sir!