I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.
I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:
> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.
I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?
Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".
Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down.
When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."
I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.
I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.
If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.
Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.
---
Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?
If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.
This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?
The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.
Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.
> the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center
This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.
I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property.
It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open community consultation, and reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence phase but not once the formal approval process begins; that seems fine.
It's not good and improper for the government to selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.
You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.
Typically constituents don’t have any ability to veto. I imagine there are some cases in CA, thinking of that amusing article about an ice cream shop getting blocked by another ice cream shop.
It’s usually an indirect vote with your voice. To be frank, people don’t have that much of a role in what business gets built if it aligns with the states economic goals and zoning is not being critically changed.
I think the bigger discussion is if resources are going to be constrained can we make sure the use is being properly charged for resource buildout. It’s the same problem with building sports arenas or sweetheart tax deals for manufacturing plants, they often don’t pan out.
> Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?
In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.
It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.
But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.
Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.
Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior…
Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates.
Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?
As a percentage of GDP investments in the railroad buildout in the US was comparable or slightly higher than AI-related investments. But they are on the same order of magnitude, which says a lot about the scale of AI.
> AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022. A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39% annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman commented that investment in information processing equipment & software is equivalent to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual rate in the first half.
Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x for some x given inflation.
But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.
Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.
Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).
Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.
Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW:
> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at
This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.
Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?
The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.
I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc.
There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.
The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.
Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].
Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.
The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute.
Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.
A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain.
When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.
A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.
In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.
> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY
Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.
It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.
The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."
It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.
Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money.
So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.
The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote:
- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals
- Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding.
- Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles
We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.
Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:
* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick
* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials
Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.
Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.
"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.
Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.
I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure?
For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.
I live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of a time getting answers to questions.
The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation increases. There is speculation that the valuation algorithm is using these "motivated buyer" sales to inflate other property values even though the likelihood of similar sales occurring in the future is very slim.
In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.
Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.
I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia.
My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".
That only means they have to be built in counties which are part of that compact, or have approved provisions to return the water back to be net-neutral and comply with environmental impact laws (unless your Foxconn or legacy manufacturer or farmer). However, Beaver Dam WI as this article calls out is along a fresh water source and does not require Lake Michigan water.
The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.
> Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.
I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?
Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
I can understand concerns about moving thousands of acre-feet of water into the desert for cooling, or pumping your aquifer dry for the same thing. But moving water from the Great Lakes a few miles inland? How much water evaporates out of the Great Lakes every day, and what is the percentage increase when used for cooling?
Water levels have been down for years as-is. It may not seem like much now, but I think it's important to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" scenario in the future.
Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.
Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.
I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.
Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.
There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.
When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.
Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.
Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren’t competing against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie ‘manufacturing hubs’.
Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.
Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.
Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
There is no need for this many data centers.
LLMs are a scourge on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they do when these are no longer needed?
I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
The compute will find a use case; if the AI bubble bursts I'm sure all the excess capacity will be rerouted to crypto again. But also, there's still plenty of usage in chatbots or image / video generation, I'm not convinced that will just stop.
I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.
I don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in.
I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it?
I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth.
How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?
One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways.
Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.
There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.
So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.
This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin. Like I said in my comment, some states aren’t well equipped to handle new manufacturing/dc.
I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments seriously.
So add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI?
You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.
Someone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.
It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.
It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden.
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.
Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.
If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our servants are doing with our equipment on our time.
There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around
I wouldn't mind if they put one in Douglas county where I have a cabin. It would hopefully get some of the locals off government disability payments which seems to be the main income source there.
This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.
It's the standard municipal playbook now: obscure the deal until the ground is broken to avoid NIMBYism, then present it as a fait accompli for jobs.
The interesting part will be the resource strain. These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for. I wonder if the secrecy deals include clauses about priority access to utilities during peak load events?
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in construction. Once operational, a massive data center might only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.
Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
Aside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really needs to be done onsite.
You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.
They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water.
If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.
If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.
I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.
On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.
Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves.
I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for.
Are you NIMBYing for our AI overlords which will replace all the work we do and give us unlimited prosperity at the push of a button?
This incident will be reported. /s
On a more serious note, when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize that humans cannot eat money (or silicon for that matter).
Ha, point taken.
But the 'NIMBY' argument is interesting here because unlike a housing development (which uses local resources for local people), a data center extracts local resources (water/power) to export value globally. It's an extraction economy dynamic, just with electrons instead of ore.
No say "nothing to see here" like giving people nothing to see.
Also interesting that these investors could have invested in power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not interested in investing in people.
When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by the people of the community.
Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.
I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering.
Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.
They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already a serious worry to people already struggling to afford electricity.
But if electricity prices go up, doesn’t that motivate new generation? Like, it is pretty common to see prices go up, then supply increase, then prices go down.
My understanding is that they use up a lot of water and electricity, driving costs up for local residents.
Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction)
In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term
utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me
Yeah it’s wild to me to. Especially as I think rising rates are getting misaligned with data centers. I am sure the continued demand has added to some of the costs but people are forgetting most of the US grid is ancient and largely neglected. When building a facility requiring large electric or water usage that facility is usually paying large upfront costs to get connected with 10 or 20 year contracts.
It’s a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is seen as negative.
I find it strange that when there is a housing crisis, they can't seem to build enough, frequently because of building permit refusals. But when a data centers get secrecy and fast tracked before anyone can oppose them.
In addition to environmental concerns (including power and water usage) & noise pollution concerns, which are specific to data centers, local citizens are also against the tax breaks the owners of these data centers get. This bit isn't unique to the data centers, and we also saw similar pushback when details like this came out around Amazon warehouses. The fact is, the local communities don't reap the benefits from these despite having to shoulder the cost. Once built, they provide few, if any, jobs, little money goes back to the community, no new products or services are provided.
Its pure fearmongering by the opposition. Before NPR became a total meme, they used to be overly crunchy granola and against all technological or industrial advancement. They are just getting back to their roots.
Kind of typical capital move; don't care about the opinions of people in places like Wisconsin - and indeed, my area in Kansas City - and instead only care about how you can squeeze profit out of them.
NIMBY for data centers is opportunity for SpaceX. When they saturate the demand for communication, data processing demand will be ramping up with no apparent ceiling. The merger between SpaceX and xAI positions them to benefit both from the AI revolution, and from the resistance to it. It's like a hypothetical 19th century textile company that managed to profit from Luddite riots by using them to help move production to Umpa Loompa.
Space doesn't seem like a good place to build datacenters at all. Cooling is going to be an enormous issue, how do you disperse of heat in a vaccuum? Radiators are very ineffective for cooling.
Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of particles, so it's by definition cold.
Naturally the system needs energy, the sun giving radiation convertible to electricity should enable that.
Space is indeed very cold, but it does not cool you off very quickly. The lack of particles means it's harder to get heat away from yourself. Essentially all of the energy produced via solar panels would be converted to heat by the computers.
Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.
I haven't done the actual math and I might be a few orders of magnitude off but shouldn't electrical resistance drop quite significantly in space, too? (Of course there's the other issue that information processing is an inherently dissipative process because entropy etc.)
How would electrical resistance drop in space? If you're thinking "because it's cold" that's actually the biggest issue. The vacuum means you can't dispose of heat easily, so you need giant radiators, which are expensive, heavy, etc.
there's no repair involved. imagine a series of throwaway satellites on an orbit that essentially leaves them close enough together for effective mesh networking, and probably on an orbit that slowly takes them away from earth.
the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal.
and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.
I've always assumed that the answer to this would be no. However, I also always assumed that a huge space-based internet system would be both expensive and impractical for bandwidth and latency.
Starlink has largely defied those expectations thanks to their approach to optimize launch costs.
It is possible that I'm overlooking some similar fundamental advancement that would make this less impractical than it sounds. I'm still really skeptical.
No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the issues of radiation and heat dissipation.
this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about.
This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them.
I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX? Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it.
The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises:
- demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York by the end of 2017
- "autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year"
- “thousands” of Optimus humanoid robots working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025."
- Tesla semi trucks rollout (Pepsi paid for 100 semis in 2017, and deliveries started in 2022, and now 8 years later they have received half of them.)
I have put as much money as I believe in it (risk adjusted). And same goes for Google, Spacex, Blue Origin and other companies.
This trope
> It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Really needs to stop. This is based on a naive interpretation of how wealth gets created. Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like. Whether you like him as a person or not, he has done stuff in the past and that's reason enough to believe him now.
Google is hardly betting on it; they are exploring the feasibility of it and are frank about the engineering challenges:
> significant engineering challenges remain, such as thermal management, high-bandwidth ground communications, and on-orbit system reliability.[1]
why do you think this changes what i said? I know it has constraints but the fact is that Google is serious about it. Enough to publicly speak about it many times and invest enormous amounts of R&D.
You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.
> Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been operating for a while. But why would you say they are hardly betting on it?
As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious about it?
I never said Google wasn't serious; I said they are hardly betting on it relative to their other capital expenditures. Google rightfully describes this as a "moonshot." To date, the only public hardware commitment is two prototype satellites in 2027 for a feasibility study. Compared to the billions pouring into Waymo, DeepMind, and terrestrial data centers, this doesn't yet qualify as an "enormous" financial bet, even if the engineering intent is serious.
Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?
Because it will inflate their stock valuations? It's like with fusion energy or going to Mars etc., constantly X years away and currently economically unfeasible.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but "AI datacenter in space" is the kind of phrase that attracts investors, that's straight from Musk's playbook for keeping the stock trading at ridiculous P/Es, especially now that he is planning SpaceX IPO.
why does it attract investors if it is so obvious that it will fail?
it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory you are trying to assert - musk comes up with an absurd idea that captures investor's attention. its not like he wants to make a good product, he just wants to fool investors. not only that, he fools them, gets the money and then puts said money into this venture that obviously won't work. why does he waste his time into a venture that obviously won't work? who knows
Because "investors" are a large group. Many of them are not involved in the industry and are clueless about tech. Same reason they invest in OpenAI, that hasn't made any money.
Investors, both commercial and individual, often have more money than sense.
You should ask yourself this, not me, you're the one who blindly believes what Musk says. He also said he was creating a new political party in the US, how's that going? Did you believe him when he talked about landing people on Mars in 2018? It’s 2026. How is boring company going? etc.
I think you're overinterpreting what I wrote and projecting. I'm telling you how the physics works, and the physics is simple here: unless you change the physics or discover some exotic, cheap materials, this is 100% not economically viable today or in the near future.
I wouldn’t overthink the SpaceX / xAI thing. Seems to me it’s a pure financing play to blend two companies owned by the same guy that might look meh on their own to the market but have a compelling narrative about “future growth” together.
All so that the same guy who is already quite rich can continue to run his funny-up money roll-up machine, re-capitalize on a bunch of froth and leave other people holding the bag.
what about Google? It's always the same tired thought ending cliches - companies with "bad" people do obviously "bad" thing to convince idiotic shareholders and prop up the bubble.
i keep seeing this same repeated trope again and again.
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed.
I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article:
> If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.
I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice?
Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".
Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down.
When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."
I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.
If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.
Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.
---
Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?
If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.
it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.
I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.
This is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?
The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.
Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.
> the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center
This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.
I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property.
It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open community consultation, and reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence phase but not once the formal approval process begins; that seems fine.
It's not good and improper for the government to selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.
You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.
What kind of say do the residents have when it’s nearly a done deal?
Unless the residents have a strong enough chance to veto, they’re just speaking into the void as far as the company is concerned.
Typically constituents don’t have any ability to veto. I imagine there are some cases in CA, thinking of that amusing article about an ice cream shop getting blocked by another ice cream shop.
It’s usually an indirect vote with your voice. To be frank, people don’t have that much of a role in what business gets built if it aligns with the states economic goals and zoning is not being critically changed.
I think the bigger discussion is if resources are going to be constrained can we make sure the use is being properly charged for resource buildout. It’s the same problem with building sports arenas or sweetheart tax deals for manufacturing plants, they often don’t pan out.
> Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics?
In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.
It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.
But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.
Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.
the building of the American Railroads were the largest capital endeavor in known history IIR. .. and Stanford was in the center of that, too
Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior…
Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates.
Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?
As a percentage of GDP investments in the railroad buildout in the US was comparable or slightly higher than AI-related investments. But they are on the same order of magnitude, which says a lot about the scale of AI.
> AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022. A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39% annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman commented that investment in information processing equipment & software is equivalent to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual rate in the first half.
https://www.cadtm.org/The-AI-bubble-and-the-US-economy?utm_s...
Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly value the work
By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...
Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.
Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x for some x given inflation.
But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.
Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.
Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).
Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.
Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Don't give them any ideas
> I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at
This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.
Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?
Yes. The company surveyed a number of surrounding locales, looking for a favorable situation. Harwood had the existing Fargo infrastructure and the mayor of Harwood was happy to take a payout. I think the company predation was transparent.
How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?
Hollywood in its heights also uses this kind of opportunistic abuse in siting movies and TV
The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.
But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.
I wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc.
There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.
I can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.
There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."
The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.
Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.
I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].
Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
"Tragedy of the commons" is suffering from people overusing it.
The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.
The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute.
Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.
Pay them more then
Arguably, an 800 person town is likely quite far from most.
An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.
> Everybody wants X to exist
Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.
A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain.
When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.
A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.
Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid.
Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.
In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.
^ This right here.
> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY
Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.
It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.
The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."
It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.
Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money.
So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.
Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.
The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote:
- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles
We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.
Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:
* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick
* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials
* rising electricity bills
* rising water bills
> use too much ground water
Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.
The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?
Is it? It's my understanding that cooling an AI data centre takes massive amounts of water. Agriculture may be worse but no one is saying they want that either.
Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.
"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.
Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.
Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.
I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure?
For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.
https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...
I live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of a time getting answers to questions.
The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation increases. There is speculation that the valuation algorithm is using these "motivated buyer" sales to inflate other property values even though the likelihood of similar sales occurring in the future is very slim.
They primary concern is these centers will force water and energy expansions and those will be equally split.
Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check equally split or based on drinks had?
The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.
There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
It’s to run LLMs.
In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.
Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.
I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia.
My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".
The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.
I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
That only means they have to be built in counties which are part of that compact, or have approved provisions to return the water back to be net-neutral and comply with environmental impact laws (unless your Foxconn or legacy manufacturer or farmer). However, Beaver Dam WI as this article calls out is along a fresh water source and does not require Lake Michigan water.
The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.
> Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.
I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?
Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
I can understand concerns about moving thousands of acre-feet of water into the desert for cooling, or pumping your aquifer dry for the same thing. But moving water from the Great Lakes a few miles inland? How much water evaporates out of the Great Lakes every day, and what is the percentage increase when used for cooling?
Water levels have been down for years as-is. It may not seem like much now, but I think it's important to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" scenario in the future.
let's hope this holds, i have no reason to expect that in 2026
Same reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.
Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.
I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.
Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.
There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.
When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.
Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.
Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
How big is the business?
It's still contract work. When it's over so is your paycheck.
Should still be orders different from a the continuous labor intensive manufacturing of F35's
Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren’t competing against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie ‘manufacturing hubs’.
NASA got its support in much the same way during the space race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get political support.
Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing.
Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.
Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.
Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.
> I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?
They don’t, but Wisconsin is a pretty good spot for them.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
There is no need for this many data centers. LLMs are a scourge on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they do when these are no longer needed?
I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.
Commensurate to the actual cost?
> as they are currently implemented
As they are currently implemented, I get daily value from them.
You are capable of considering effects of systems outside of your immediate, moment-to-moment needs?
With no disrespect to GorbachevyChase, I am going to say that this lack of understanding externalities is a trait of sociopathy.
I can't wait for cheap RAM and SSDs to flood the market...
The compute will find a use case; if the AI bubble bursts I'm sure all the excess capacity will be rerouted to crypto again. But also, there's still plenty of usage in chatbots or image / video generation, I'm not convinced that will just stop.
> what will they do when these are no longer needed?
Bitcoin—>Altcoin—>NFTs—>StableCoin—>AI—>They'll just invent something new to over-hype and spend billions on.
It won't end until we reach the Shoe Event Horizon.
I'm not sure it's that linear
https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-venezue...
Ftfa “ The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for typical development proposals in the planning stages…”
Sounds like it’s not something new or reserved for data enter projects only but I agree it sure seems a shady practice.
I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.
Yeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude smaller than 500+ acres.
I don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in.
I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it?
I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth.
How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in?
One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways.
Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.
There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.
So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.
This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin. Like I said in my comment, some states aren’t well equipped to handle new manufacturing/dc.
I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments seriously.
its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had
So add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI?
You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.
> “I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said.
The audacity of public officials these days is astounding.
Foxconn on steroids
Foxconn was just bribery, they never planned on building anything.
Someone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.
It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.
The most important news is in the subtitle -
> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.
Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.
It's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden.
Secret deals with corporations is corruption.
Secrecy needs a time limit.
Why do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
In a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership.
Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.
> the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
They'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.
If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our servants are doing with our equipment on our time.
Then you'll need to tell them democracy overrules commercial reasons.
There are valid uses. McDonalds may not want Burger King to know they're planning to build a new location in Smallville, 'till they actually break ground, or vice versa. Don't blabber to everyone that the City wants to expand a park, so neighboring property owners will know to demand top dollar. Etc.
But yeah - honest uses are pretty limited. Which limits we can hope will be tightly enforced by new legislation.
Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing business.
I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?
Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
I can't believe this is still around. I remember printing this out to show my science teacher decades ago.
You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
Then you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around
I wouldn't mind if they put one in Douglas county where I have a cabin. It would hopefully get some of the locals off government disability payments which seems to be the main income source there.
This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.
It's the standard municipal playbook now: obscure the deal until the ground is broken to avoid NIMBYism, then present it as a fait accompli for jobs. The interesting part will be the resource strain. These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for. I wonder if the secrecy deals include clauses about priority access to utilities during peak load events?
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
That's exactly the issue. The jobs are front-loaded in construction. Once operational, a massive data center might only employ 30-50 high-skill technicians.
Compared to a factory of the same square footage that might employ 500+ people, the 'jobs per megawatt' ratio is terrible. It's essentially renting out the local power grid to a remote entity, not creating a local economy.
They bring in temporary construction jobs but once running they provide no meaningful jobs.
Aside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really needs to be done onsite.
You might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.
They neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water.
If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all.
If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman.
I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
> use copious amounts of water.
If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months.
On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water.
Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves.
I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for.
Are you NIMBYing for our AI overlords which will replace all the work we do and give us unlimited prosperity at the push of a button?
This incident will be reported. /s
On a more serious note, when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize that humans cannot eat money (or silicon for that matter).
Ha, point taken. But the 'NIMBY' argument is interesting here because unlike a housing development (which uses local resources for local people), a data center extracts local resources (water/power) to export value globally. It's an extraction economy dynamic, just with electrons instead of ore.
No say "nothing to see here" like giving people nothing to see.
Also interesting that these investors could have invested in power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not interested in investing in people.
When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by the people of the community.
Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.
I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering.
Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.
They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already a serious worry to people already struggling to afford electricity.
But if electricity prices go up, doesn’t that motivate new generation? Like, it is pretty common to see prices go up, then supply increase, then prices go down.
> And solar is getting really cheap.
Alas...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/wind-s...
Yes pollution.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-powe...
My understanding is that they use up a lot of water and electricity, driving costs up for local residents.
Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction)
In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me
Yeah it’s wild to me to. Especially as I think rising rates are getting misaligned with data centers. I am sure the continued demand has added to some of the costs but people are forgetting most of the US grid is ancient and largely neglected. When building a facility requiring large electric or water usage that facility is usually paying large upfront costs to get connected with 10 or 20 year contracts.
It’s a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is seen as negative.
Data centers absolutely cause pollution.
I find it strange that when there is a housing crisis, they can't seem to build enough, frequently because of building permit refusals. But when a data centers get secrecy and fast tracked before anyone can oppose them.
In addition to environmental concerns (including power and water usage) & noise pollution concerns, which are specific to data centers, local citizens are also against the tax breaks the owners of these data centers get. This bit isn't unique to the data centers, and we also saw similar pushback when details like this came out around Amazon warehouses. The fact is, the local communities don't reap the benefits from these despite having to shoulder the cost. Once built, they provide few, if any, jobs, little money goes back to the community, no new products or services are provided.
Its pure fearmongering by the opposition. Before NPR became a total meme, they used to be overly crunchy granola and against all technological or industrial advancement. They are just getting back to their roots.
> Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company
How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?
Turns out sucking up all the information there is and displaying ads is worth a lot.
That’s still a little mind boggling.
They don’t make anything or directly help somebody else make something.
they provide a platform that can maybe sometimes nudges an individual purchasing decisions in one direction.
They capture around 15% of global ad spending.
$200bn annual revenue with a 5x sales multiple gets you to a trillion dollars.
because it is all made up
Kind of typical capital move; don't care about the opinions of people in places like Wisconsin - and indeed, my area in Kansas City - and instead only care about how you can squeeze profit out of them.
NIMBY for data centers is opportunity for SpaceX. When they saturate the demand for communication, data processing demand will be ramping up with no apparent ceiling. The merger between SpaceX and xAI positions them to benefit both from the AI revolution, and from the resistance to it. It's like a hypothetical 19th century textile company that managed to profit from Luddite riots by using them to help move production to Umpa Loompa.
Space doesn't seem like a good place to build datacenters at all. Cooling is going to be an enormous issue, how do you disperse of heat in a vaccuum? Radiators are very ineffective for cooling.
Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of particles, so it's by definition cold.
Naturally the system needs energy, the sun giving radiation convertible to electricity should enable that.
Both parts are documented about ISS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter...
Space is indeed very cold, but it does not cool you off very quickly. The lack of particles means it's harder to get heat away from yourself. Essentially all of the energy produced via solar panels would be converted to heat by the computers.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a container ship, convert it to a data center and connect it to a bunch of floating panels?
Most systems use fresh water for cooling. Salt water can corrode pipes and deposit sediment, but maybe there's a way to use ocean water efficiently.
They also need to be powered and connected to a network, but that seems like an easier problem.
the internal loop can be fresh water which heat exchanges with the ocean water
Do data centers in space actually make sense? I can’t figure out how that’s possible. But some people seem to believe they do(?)
Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.
I haven't done the actual math and I might be a few orders of magnitude off but shouldn't electrical resistance drop quite significantly in space, too? (Of course there's the other issue that information processing is an inherently dissipative process because entropy etc.)
How would electrical resistance drop in space? If you're thinking "because it's cold" that's actually the biggest issue. The vacuum means you can't dispose of heat easily, so you need giant radiators, which are expensive, heavy, etc.
there's no repair involved. imagine a series of throwaway satellites on an orbit that essentially leaves them close enough together for effective mesh networking, and probably on an orbit that slowly takes them away from earth.
the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal.
and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.
I've always assumed that the answer to this would be no. However, I also always assumed that a huge space-based internet system would be both expensive and impractical for bandwidth and latency.
Starlink has largely defied those expectations thanks to their approach to optimize launch costs.
It is possible that I'm overlooking some similar fundamental advancement that would make this less impractical than it sounds. I'm still really skeptical.
> Do data centers in space actually make sense?
No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the issues of radiation and heat dissipation.
this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about.
This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them.
I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX? Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it.
The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises: - demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York by the end of 2017 - "autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year" - “thousands” of Optimus humanoid robots working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025." - Tesla semi trucks rollout (Pepsi paid for 100 semis in 2017, and deliveries started in 2022, and now 8 years later they have received half of them.)
I have put as much money as I believe in it (risk adjusted). And same goes for Google, Spacex, Blue Origin and other companies.
This trope
> It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Really needs to stop. This is based on a naive interpretation of how wealth gets created. Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like. Whether you like him as a person or not, he has done stuff in the past and that's reason enough to believe him now.
>Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like
Are you trolling?
Google is hardly betting on it; they are exploring the feasibility of it and are frank about the engineering challenges: > significant engineering challenges remain, such as thermal management, high-bandwidth ground communications, and on-orbit system reliability.[1]
[1] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
why do you think this changes what i said? I know it has constraints but the fact is that Google is serious about it. Enough to publicly speak about it many times and invest enormous amounts of R&D.
You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.
> Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been operating for a while. But why would you say they are hardly betting on it?
As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious about it?
I never said Google wasn't serious; I said they are hardly betting on it relative to their other capital expenditures. Google rightfully describes this as a "moonshot." To date, the only public hardware commitment is two prototype satellites in 2027 for a feasibility study. Compared to the billions pouring into Waymo, DeepMind, and terrestrial data centers, this doesn't yet qualify as an "enormous" financial bet, even if the engineering intent is serious.
i agree with you then. lets agree that the intent is serious.
Everyone were also betting on quantum computing and the hydrogen energy revolution.
My napkin math says that, for a system at around 75°C, you would need about 13,000 square meters of radiators in space to reject 10 MW of heat.
why do you think they are betting on it if it so obvious to you that it won't work?
Just because some CEOs pour billions into fantasy projects it doesn't mean they're viable. Otherwise we all would be in the metaverse wouldn't we?
Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?
Because it will inflate their stock valuations? It's like with fusion energy or going to Mars etc., constantly X years away and currently economically unfeasible.
why do you think their stock will inflate?
Well it made you invest in them.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but "AI datacenter in space" is the kind of phrase that attracts investors, that's straight from Musk's playbook for keeping the stock trading at ridiculous P/Es, especially now that he is planning SpaceX IPO.
why does it attract investors if it is so obvious that it will fail?
it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory you are trying to assert - musk comes up with an absurd idea that captures investor's attention. its not like he wants to make a good product, he just wants to fool investors. not only that, he fools them, gets the money and then puts said money into this venture that obviously won't work. why does he waste his time into a venture that obviously won't work? who knows
Because "investors" are a large group. Many of them are not involved in the industry and are clueless about tech. Same reason they invest in OpenAI, that hasn't made any money.
Investors, both commercial and individual, often have more money than sense.
You should ask yourself this, not me, you're the one who blindly believes what Musk says. He also said he was creating a new political party in the US, how's that going? Did you believe him when he talked about landing people on Mars in 2018? It’s 2026. How is boring company going? etc. I think you're overinterpreting what I wrote and projecting. I'm telling you how the physics works, and the physics is simple here: unless you change the physics or discover some exotic, cheap materials, this is 100% not economically viable today or in the near future.
I wouldn’t overthink the SpaceX / xAI thing. Seems to me it’s a pure financing play to blend two companies owned by the same guy that might look meh on their own to the market but have a compelling narrative about “future growth” together.
All so that the same guy who is already quite rich can continue to run his funny-up money roll-up machine, re-capitalize on a bunch of froth and leave other people holding the bag.
what about Google? It's always the same tired thought ending cliches - companies with "bad" people do obviously "bad" thing to convince idiotic shareholders and prop up the bubble.
i keep seeing this same repeated trope again and again.
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
Yep. That was my first thought when I saw the SpaceX & xAI merger news.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
Is this satire? I can't even tell anymore. If so, bravo.