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Not covered in the article are two critical reasons:
1. They're breaking environmental laws in order to meet power demands. xAI has already been busted on this [1], but they keep finding willing accomplices in rural parts of the country to bypass public opposition or speedrun through regulatory exceptions [2].
2. Companies seem to be fudging their numbers when it comes to GPU capacity & current workloads [3], likely to inflate their IPO valuations. I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure but I've not seen any journalist on the other side of the argument provide the volume of data that he has.
[1] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/musks-xai-draws-more-opposit...
[3] https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/
> I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure
The main counterarguments to his claims are "but Sam/Dario/Satya/Jensen said X" and that we should treat them as gospel.
What is the advantage to not keeping them a secret? The populist movement against AI is growing rapidly, and is supported by bunk science which affirms people's pre-existing biases (like the idea that data centers suck up all the water in a community, or raise the ambient temperature by a single-double digit number of degrees F).
AI is a genuine source of economic growth. I can understand wanting to curtail it, but in return you are getting fewer jobs, less economic growth, more money to other countries who don't allow protesting or even complaining about data centers, etc.
The US has deindustrialized and since the rise of NIMBY politics hasn't built new industry in any scale at all. The first freeway revolts happened in 1959. In the meantime, basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too poor/politically disconnected to organize, but eventually that too became difficult.
Since automation became big in industrial processes, most industrial development has been labor-poor (few workers) but continues to be land intensive. That means while industry might generate tax revenue, it doesn't have a coalition of labor advocates willing to champion the capacity because not many jobs are created. So we find ourselves in 2026 with an inability to actually build new industrial capacity in any form. The anti-tech crowd is angry at the data centers, but the same exact thing is happening when it comes to permitting new power generation and transmission lines. In fact many of the concerns related to data center power usage could be allayed if we had more power generation but nobody wants power generation in their backyard.
For decades now the US has been dancing around the idea that there is no by-right way to build anything anymore, so building any new large structure becomes a collective action problem that just ends up failing. Even when things get built, costs are massive. This has even affected things that the US is ostensibly really good at making such as highways, as evident in the recent Texas highway expansions ongoing.
You're conflating AI and AI Data centres. What kind of "jobs" does AI data centre creates? More jobs for factory workers who assemble video cards to be shipped and installed in a rack?
Why are they bunk science? I’m not an environmental expert, but the research papers and policies I’ve read don’t seem to be egregiously wrong.
I’m asking genuinely, I’m open to changing my mind here.
> I can understand wanting to curtail it, but in return you are getting fewer jobs,
since AI -- as designed to be deployed -- is taking away jobs, then by enabling data centers you are in fact getting fewer jobs
yours is the same perverse argument that was used to build Walmart Supercenters (lower prices! they'll create jobs!) which literally destroyed the economy of many small towns and communities, and paved the way for every other big box retailer to do the same
so don't be surprised that people aren't eager to enable something that is designed to destroy their livelihood
Since electricity demand has outpaced supply they are increasing prices:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
> AI is a genuine source of economic growth.
If only they could spur even more economic growth with the planning and construction of more fabs for all the RAM it will need (assuming the level of growth that their S-1s are claiming)
more money to other countries who don't allow protesting or even complaining about data centers,
The point of living in a rich country is that you don't lower your standards to shit holes with corrupt governments...
>but in return you are getting fewer jobs,
Certainly not in any meaningful way.
Modern data centers are effectively mines, but without even the upside of supporting a local economy.
They extract local resources (land, power, grid capacity, water, etc) and sell that as compute. As a rule, the mine operators are national or multi-national firms that have no presence with which to invest the extraction profits back into the community. The local resources are harvested, processed, and sold, and then the proceeds disperse into the books of these gargantuan, far-off operators.
The only way to recover some of the profits on those local resources where they're being harvested would be with taxes or similar ongoing development obligations, but the firms specifically predate on communities too politically weak to levy those against them.
If AI isn't just an speculative bubble with gross overinvestment, they may have important value as a national economic or security interest, but they're pretty terrible and lop-sided deal for existing communities. That's why they're kept quiet.
They're being built in as much secret as possible because everything is. Everything about land development is adversarial and the people who keep their mouths shut wind up taking fewer 4-7 figure screwings along the way than the honest people.
It sucks that this how it is but even just the most casual familiarity with all the rules and processes makes it obvious why this is the way it is.
You could find more than enough data points to write this same story about grocery stores or anything else.
I enjoy reminding people the land acquisition history behind building Disney World.
But why shouldn't the possible neighbors of some unpleasant installation protest as much as allowed, and file lawsuits? Neighbors interests have value too, plus we in the USA have a constitutional right to free speech and petition for redress of grievances. The US also has an adversarial legal system. It pays off to file lawsuits if you can afford it.
My conclusion is that "NIMBY" isn't the problem, it's economic incentives and adversarial systems.
We, as a society, set up rules to allow the people to have a voice in decisions via various means including public meetings and various review procedures. There is a cost to these rules, but the alternative you're describing is a system where rules and laws don't matter and anyone with the ear of a few influential people can do whatever they want.
Just as an example, there's a data center in the early stages about 10 miles from my house. The land developer spent a year shopping for a city council that would skip the hearings required by state law and finally found a small exurb willing to break the law. Now the developer is racing to break ground before the lawsuits and restraining orders hit. This isn't the way that a logical society should work.
Is "keeping your mouth shut" dishonesty?
grocery stores? They are not comparable to data centers.
People's bewilderment about this stuff speaks more to how removed they are from their local civics.
Nearly everything in your town is built like this. The amount of people who come out of the woodwork to oppose coffee shops, housing development, new hospitals, bus stops, etc would astound you. Try attending a local city council meeting. Part of the reason civic infrastructure takes so long and costs so much is because of the enormous burdens of transparency.
Or the sheer number of things that can go wrong during zoning, development, etc. The best time to announce a new business is when construction is nearly done. And the cities themselves want the development to be secret because they don't want to be underbid by the town next door (did anybody actually like the transparency of Amazon's HQ2 process?)
The less NIMBYs are involved or aware of any infrastructure project, the better. Is that even a question? They ruined enough opportunities and wealth in the last decades.
I don't recall anyone in my town being overly angry when fiber internet dug up their front yards.
But the datacenter they couldn't stop has made national news multiple times.
Also, what wealth? "Please allow me to exploit your land for little benefit to you" isn't a great selling point.
Yes, it is a question. Obviously a balance must be struck but where the line is drawn will depend. The point about "ruining wealth opportunities" will likely rub a lot of people the wrong way even on a place like YCombinator forum
some of these projects impact surrounding homes and businesses. NIMBYs should definitely be aware and involved
When I grew up in Singapore, the locations of all data centers are secret by default to prevent terrorist attacks.
I mean the framing is so silly.
"If bank vaults are so great, why would you not advertise their locations". It's a mystery, is what it is.
I'm as big of a skeptic on these AI companies and question deeply the long term value of data center buildout as a land use policy in the communities where they're being built. But:
> So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?
Because of this (emphasis mine):
> They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values
How are you supposed to have reasonable discussion about land use, economic impacts, zoning, etc when you're getting flooded with input from crockpots?
Can you say with absolute certainty that sick animals and long term impacts on their health are not caused by data centers? Certainly we have long list of examples where industrial activity contaminated areas with little oversight and it did kill animals and cause long-term impacts on health. I think you're saying that data centers do not pollute in a way that would cause sick animals or long-term impacts on health, but I don't think that can be stated confidently.
To stop assholes from bombing them
When I’ve visited the big data centers, they had gates and security relatively far out from the buildings. How would you get close enough? It’s not like the World Trade Center in 1993 where you can just drive up next to the building. (It’s also not like the World Trade Center in 2026 where there is an anti-terrorism perimeter of steel-reinforced concrete bollards, but somewhere in the middle.)
Of course there are also data centers in the middle of cities but these are smaller.
Give me example where datacenter is bombed in the US?
We didn't have known datacenters bombed till now
I mean yes, Amazon servers in the middle east aren't doing great, but I guess it's not what you're talking about
The secrets are kept prior to breaking ground. After that everyone knows what it is.
This is the top comment:
“ And ask if AI is so great why hasn’t it designed resource efficient data centers?
And ask what the data centers are actually doing. Bitcoin mining, anyone?”
Says all you need to know about the competency level of this position, which is ideological and not fact-based
And what happened to Climate Change? Seems that they don't care about it anymore, they rather have their data centers which give them more control over society
They’re not built in secret, it’s just no one cared until now. How come no one cared when AWS and the other big cloud providers were building out all that infrastructure? Some one should put together a map of all data centers (not just “ai” datacenters), current and planned, complete with power and water consumption. oh the humanity!
Secret like this announcement by Google? https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-clo...
Post is from last week, and is just an intro to the map project, discussed here at length:
Looks like we're all so starry-eyed with the wonder of this shiny new tech that we don't gaf about global warming anymore (or the other impacts on society)
One reason is that politicians have vilified them for their own political means. Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant. They are being used as yet another pawn piece to push inequity and climate change agendas. It’s been quite a successful strategy.
The conflation of concerns and synechdochal arguments are a wonder to behold.
There's a ton of expensive hardware that thieves might want. Why wouldn't you keep that quiet.
Uh, no? It was not built in secret before the AI hype.
In fact as late as Jan 2026 Google was proudly presenting their new data centers in Bangkok: https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-01-21-Google-Clo...
Disclaimer: Google Cloud employee
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