It used to be standard that companies would build infrastructure along with their plants. Cities all across the US Midwest were built this way.
It might be that they can't. (Well, not without spending even more money or time.)
They're looking for power which:
1. Fits on-site, rather than needing more space or being far away and dependent on the grid.
2. Can be ramped up on-demand, to keep their stuff running if there's a blackout.
3. Prioritizes their facility with "first dibs" when there are brownouts or other issues.
4. Can be built quickly so that they can finish the facility and start selling/renting.
These requirements are tend to conflict with the goals of making cheap power for sale: An offshore wind-farm might mollify local ratepayers, but it doesn't do anything for their facility reaching "ready".
There's nothing to stop hyperclouds from finishing it with temporary nat gas behind the meter now and striking long-term power purchase agreements that fund extra utility build-out.
They're not doing that because (a) it costs more and (b) nobody has made them.
Hopefully that'll change with a bluer Texas, new Congress, and more assertive municipalities.
There's a trivial path to win/win here, if the companies were universally required to enter into sustainable deals (both financially and environmentally). Even playing field nationally = no particular cloud wins by finding the rube locality that will accept a bad datacenter deal.
If in a year Mississippi said "Plants are ready to deliver on that power purchase agreement you signed, at a lower cost than onsite turbines" then they'd be turned off.
Yet instead of a PPA, xAI contracted with TVA for wholesale power, is building their own dedicated turbines, and is using mobile turbines temporarily.
None of that helps the regional electricity market, because it's not integrated.
IMO data centers themselves are environmentally unobjectionable, but gas turbines are loud polluters and it should be almost impossible to get permits for more than a few months at a time.
The existing law could be used to stop them just fine but Trump has no interest in that.
But there's a bigger problem going on here.
Our elites no longer believe in the social contract.
They intend to crush the rest of us beneath their boot.
They need to be brought back to heel before they do and we enter another dark age.
We need to force it to come back or things will get really bad for most people.
The real problem is that politics has gotten so broken that people have lost the connection between building things and having them. You'll have the same people opposing new generating capacity while complaining about high electric bills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems
The current industry has a voracious appetite for power. There are a variety of solutions capable of cleanly supplying it (solar, wind, nuclear).
What's missing is the shared infrastructure investment and guaranteed revenue stream contracts to link the two. This is where government industrial policy has historically and successfully stepped in (e.g. shipyards, railroads, electrification, interstate system, heavy press, etc).
Hell, guarantee waived species environmental inspections as part of the government's contribution.
Unless you can demonstrate that those problems are solved, there is no credibility to nuclear power. It doesn't need to be an endless discussion, the discussion has concluded that nuclear power is too expensive and too late to be relevant.
The data center buildout makes no sense.
I don’t want to work for a Trump lapdog, so MAGA++ recruiters can go pound sand.
I don’t think SV leadership realizes how f—-ked they are.
So true.
I remember hearing somewhere that Mark's residence in Los Gatos there has RPG proof windows in it. Like 9(?) inches thick. Even the sea lion windows at the zoo aren't that thick. The optical distortion on such a window is just immense.
I've worked with glass that thick before for radiation stuff (leaded glass though, so quite yellow, caveats apply) and it's hard to describe how it feels looking into a room via glass that thick. You can't get an angle on things the way you'd like. Tapping on it to get someone's attention is pointless, like tapping on a concrete bench. You can see in 3-D, but the subtle variations in the optical patterns make it so that focusing and moving your head is hard, your eyes always have to adjust and go a teeny bit crosseyed all the time. Then the refractive index makes things appear where you know they are not, so you're never quite sure of the location of things. Also, glass absorbs light at different frequencies at different ways. So the color you see is always going to be a bit dulled in the reds (typically), though I'm not sure what the spectrum absorbtion is for 9 inch thick RPG proof glass.
Look, point I am trying to make is that Mark really does see the world differently than we do. Like when he wakes up and looks out the window, it really is distorted. And this is but one example of how his reality is so much different than ours.
It's been true for likely 300,000 years that the oligarchs have a different reality and pressures than we serfs do. This time is absolutely no different. And the source is always the same: hubris.
Only in the MAGA world are we somehow given a choice between NDA-laden, Coal powered loud turbine data center projects or no data centers at all.
Feels like there’s always been an easy middle ground no? I agree nothing in the MAGA world has forced tech to pursue it, but it’s always been there.
Is there actually any evidence we're short on inference compute, let alone by a factor of 2.5? To me it always seemed the data centers were about accommodating some extreme predictions on future demand, scaling up training and trying to outdo one another in capturing the limited hardware.
Most people seem to be fudging around with reasoning levels to get through the day and that's pretty telling.
Using taxpayer money and kickbacks to ram through data center construction is bad, but it's not even top ten on the list of crimes the executive branch committed in the last two years.
All of this was preceded by the first economic shocks of the bubble bursting, and now it's truly underway. By this time next week it's entirely possible there will be fewer SV "Leaders" in a position to do more than wonder when exactly it all went so wrong.
Hint: It was the beginning.
They've dialed them back a bit now, but way too late. That message has sunk in.
Campaigning to prevent data centers from being built is the most actionable thing a US citizen can do, because it's a local issue (and hence something they can influence), plus they can use arguments about noise and power prices and water pollution to help make the case.
(I think most of those arguments don't stand up to scrutiny - as light industry goes data centers are pretty minor, would you prefer a concrete plant in your back yard? But I don't think the arguments are the point for a lot of people. It's about having a way to oppose AI generally.)
It's a natural reaction to sound, water, soil an earth pollution.
That said, I live out in the boonies (as far east from the SF bay area as you can go before there is just nothing but the forests of the Sierras). They are talking about building a data center in Ione, a small town out here in the middle of nowhere (not quite as remote as where I am). Now, I cannot fathom why that would be a good place. There's no water, there's no infrastructure, we're not near any internet backbone. Perhaps land is cheap out here, but electricity is served by PG&E, so I don't imagine it's particularly cheap. I, and everyone I know living out here, are vehemently against building data centers out here. It just makes no sense to put them out here, especially with the wildfire risks. There's really no propaganda needed to make people hate them.
The "or something" should have been building out power generation and feeding back a fraction of that into the grid. At least then the electricity costs can drop for the locals.
If they proposed a data centre that has it's own power generation, and fed 20% of the electricity back into the grid, there'd be less opposition.
And the anti-data center stuff is a very, very real sentiment.
"Propaganda is just helping you get in touch with your true feelings."
rushing ahead with the 'it might destroy us but we've gotta beat China!' is silly bullshit.
And the debt financing needs to stop.
There's a sensible path forward that doesn't involve a full stop, nor maintains the previous trajectory.
I find the attitude a bit weird and very left-wing purity-spiral stuff, but it is a real attitude that real people have.
it seems like a group of issues that the general public might be concerned about
People trying to 1-up each other leading to the beliefs of a group being more polarized[1]. The naming doesn't imply it's a partisan phenomenon, any more than "right wing politician" implies politicians are a right wing phenomenon
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260905_USC...
The Republicans and GOP are far off the mark from Dems and Independents, aka they are drifiting further from the center.
I don't know many right-wing folks. Most of the ones I do know are dealing with different issues and don't really give a toss about AI one way or the other.
There are good reasons for people to be pissed off about data centers in the U.S.
China is absolutely funneling money to push anti-datacenter sentiment, and many of the people involved/receiving that money are not aware of where that money came from.
We are at the crux of a national security spiral in AI development that is naturally unpopular at home.
Don't get me wrong, it's no that the tech is useless, especially for militaries and surveillance states, but it's not the economic miracle or 'new industrial revolution' so many have gotten away with promoting. I think many here will be shocked at just how quickly a fad can die when the money implodes.
Like the desire to have a livelihood?
However, I was living in the UK when the miners lost their livelihoods. Entire communities left to fend for themselves on diminishing benefits with no support.
I see some hypocrisy in our (knowledge worker) industry. The same sort of folks who were supporting Thatcherism and cheerfully calling themselves Yuppies, completely rejecting any attempt to unionise or join any collective bargaining efforts, are the same sort of folks (though not necessarily the same individuals) who are now complaining that they'll be left without a livelihood by AI.
Best time to unionise was 30 years ago. Second best time is now. But this is still somewhat of a radical position for a HN reader to hold.
Fuel costs are up for lots of reasons, more demand for electricity could certainly be one of them... Inflation is certainly another component.
Whereas instead we keep seeing proposals to ban them outright, which is the thing you'd expect to be pushed by someone with a different interest than domestic electric bills.
In some places they're scavaging old jet engines and using them to generate electricity for data centers. Lots of noise, not very efficient - very bad idea. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/climate/jet-engines-ai-da...
And contrary to a lot of recent right-wing conspiracy theories, there isn't much of a market for paying people to show up to protests.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuq/comments/1t7293k/t...
Or could pollute the entire town’s water supply?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/us-datacente...
Or air?
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...
We’re going to pretend that these are the same concerns as an HOA squabble about wrong roofs? I like AI as a useful tool worth investing in but let’s not be dismissive about what people are actually mad about, because this dismissive attitude is exactly why SV finds itself where it is.
Even the story you linked about the water supply, it was wastewater not drinking water. I'm not saying that it's good or even okay for wastewater to have bacteria in it. But if people en masse are against data centers because they "could pollute the entire town’s water supply," based on a singular case of one data center's wastewater having some bacteria, that gives me pause. This seems more like a trendy issue than a practical one for most people.
I don't know, I'm old enough to have seen a lot of public outrage against lots of stuff. It seems like it was substantive, but actually turned out to just be a trend. Obviously, it's not a strict dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either or. There can be elements of both.
But there are thousands of data centers in the world. And to my knowledge, very few people complained about them over the last twenty years. Now we're adding more, and of course again, there could be legitimate reasons for concern, but the outcry seems to be about 1000x higher, for a few hundred extra data centers, than the outcry for the first thousand extra data centers.
And that, to me, is evidence of trendiness.
It reminds me of how in 2012, so many people I knew were up in arms about Joseph Kony. And their outrage was legitimate. But by 2014, no one talked about it anymore. And if I asked them today, they probably wouldn't even remember him.
1. A threshold (you can't just keep doing more of something without a reaction eventually, once enough people are made more aware of the related issue). This part relates to the community cost of data centers.
2. A difference (they now facilitate AI, which has a popular image of stealing human effort and eliminating jobs, and, subjectively, being obnoxious).
So yes, there is some trendiness, but there are also concrete issues from which it is derived. It can't be dismissed as purely "trendy" in the "not rational/holistic" sense.
Exactly! No rational person could oppose supergeniuses like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, etc., so if people do, the logical conclusion is that they've been manipulated by a psyop.
Science is my superpower!
