5 ms·

More than 100 rally against data centers at Michigan Capitol

81 points by rmason 10mo ago

nullbyte808 10mo ago
[flagged]
rmason 10mo ago
If I could give any advice to the people planning those data centers, they've got it all wrong. They assume that since they're noisy that we will plop them smack in the middle of some good farm land, surround them with corn fields and it solves the noise problem. In Michigan cities there is plenty of vacant land. Thousands of acres of vacant land. Here in Lansing the old GM owns two large plots where factories stood stamping out Oldsmobile's. There is all the power you would ever need. They're surrounded by other factories making possibly more noise than even a data centers fans. A small business community that has been decimated by the GM employees business in the neighborhood leaving. So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.
- NedF 10mo ago
  [dead]
- itake 10mo ago
  Can someone correct me if I am wrong? The noise problem is caused by fans (air cooling). Data centers cooled by water do not have noisy fans. My understand is modern data center designs use close loop water systems, eliminating noise and water table issues.
  - xnx 10mo ago
    Closed loop water requires air fans.
  - rmason 10mo ago
    You are correct the one that I referenced in Lansing's entertainment district is water cooled. They do not point out in newspaper accounts one of the reasons for its location there is they're supplying the heated water to the towns steam district. That heated water could possibly migrate chances of a electricity rate increase. But as several data center engineers I have spoken to agreed with me that if it was put on one of the many empty parking lots West of the Capitol it would be surrounded by mostly empty government buildings where a majority of state workers are working from home. They would still be able to access the steam district.
  - zamadatix 10mo ago
    If it's true closed loop (i.e. no water evaporation to cool the loop) then how are they cooling the radiators without fans? Honestly, if there is a place it would have made sense to do evaporative cooling it was probably Michigan anyways... but I hope the closed loop option ends up working out just as well.
    - cogman10 10mo ago
      Unfortunately no. Evaporative cooling works best in low humidity areas. That's why it's so often deployed in deserts.
  - quickthrowman 10mo ago
    Most data centers use evaporative cooling towers, actually. Adding them into a cooling loop almost doubles the efficiency, it’s a no-brainer.
- Narkov 10mo ago
  Nothing in the article talks about noise pollution. Their concern is about resource usage - water and electricity.
  - vondur 10mo ago
    Is water an issue in Michigan? I thought they have plenty of water.
    - colechristensen 10mo ago
      They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
      - inferiorhuman 10mo ago
        Sure. With the suggestion of locating them on the sites of old factories: how does data center water usage compare to the factories?
      - jeffbee 10mo ago
        > over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. So, basically none?
        butvacuum 10mo ago
        Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY. 700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure. 500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year. We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
- cebert 10mo ago
  As a Michigan resident, I can’t agree more. Also areas like Flint and Pontiac are in need of jobs and economic development.
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    Data centers create some construction jobs while they are being built but not much after that. A few people to keep an eye on things, swap out failed equipment, accept deliveries.
    - colechristensen 10mo ago
      Google's data center complex in Council Bluffs, IA is one of the largest in the world and it employs ... 250 people excluding temporary construction/expansion jobs.
      - thinkmassive 10mo ago
        Are those all Google employees, or does 250 also include long-term on-site contractors? I'm thinking security, maintenance, janitorial, etc
      - runako 10mo ago
        Adds about the same number of jobs as single Costco, except this particular Costco will increase your electricity bill even if you don't work there.
    - al_borland 10mo ago
      I think the news is misleading people on the number of jobs it will create. I mentioned data centers not creating many jobs to my dad, a news junkie in Michigan, and he said he read it would create over 1k jobs. That must have been including temporary construction jobs.
      - butvacuum 10mo ago
        Three shifts of 300 people to monitor and fix things. Maybe 4 shifts because of weekends.
- yellow_lead 10mo ago
  Only the xAI ones are noisy because they (illegally?) used mobile generators to meet electricity needs
- eru 10mo ago
  Are you suggesting the people who plan data centres are stupid and/or not profit maximising?
- danans 10mo ago
  > Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways. There will be few jobs created after construction is complete, and the ones created won't pay anything like typical tech comp.
  - esseph 10mo ago
    Maybe you should calibrate your definition of what "typical tech comp" means and what roles that applies to, and at what companies. Median US Salary for a Data Center Technician is around 80k. Median US Salary is $63,360. Median household income is around $75,763 (Detroit CSA #s). There's a lot of people out of work right now.
    - runako 10mo ago
      How many people work in a modern data center?
      - al_borland 10mo ago
        Only as many as are needed to physically rack the hardware and do hand-on maintenance. The people actually using the servers shouldn’t be located on-site.
        phil21 10mo ago
        A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time. They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.
      - daheza 10mo ago
        How much will the local energy prices rise due to the datacenter? More than that offset by the employees they hire I bet.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  I'd imagine it's because dragging the fiber to middle of nowhere can be pretty expensive
  - namibj 10mo ago
    Worry about the leg-thick power cable not the pinky-thin fiber. The cost of the fiber itself basically doesn't matter relative to a data center itself.
    - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
      I see that you know nothing about anything involved. The cost of cable is essentially irrelevant in both cases, the "everything else" is the expensive part. Power can be had from the closest high voltage line (and maybe even easier to get outside of the city) The fiber have to be dragged from either nearest point of presence (a building with many fiber connections coming to it from multiple companies to exchange traffic), or to whatever dark fiber infrastructure is available nearby. In city, that's usually not that hard, ISPs already "plumbed" most of the bigger cities with fiber infrastructure. Middle of the boonies, where we want the datacenters to go ? Dig, dig dig, get permissions for digging, get permission from everything around the ride from city's fiber infrastructure to the place in middle of nowhere, months or years in getting permissions, and red tape anywhere. There is probably some power close enough, or at the very least you can find a location close to power, but location close to fiber will if anything be some existing industrial centre, and even that might not be a sure bet. You might get lucky and get a permission to use existing poles to drag some fiber on them, but it's still PITA
      - namibj 10mo ago
        They are talking gigawatt. That pretty much implies dedicated long-distance transmission lines. The 1.4 GW they mention are very close to the full output of three mile island. This is not a small power situation that is done with existing power lines. And the moment you drag power in from 20+ miles away, you might as well just put fiber in there as it seems very easy given by how prevalent it is for long distance lines these past decade or two.
- ekropotin 10mo ago
  Genuine question - are DCs really that noisy from outside? If so what is the source of the noise?
  - VTimofeenko 10mo ago
    Anecdata, but I was once on a tour of a colocation DC. Located in Vegas, near the old town in a basement of some office building. Completely unassuming from the outside. Inside it was a little loud, but not terribly so. Busy street level noise maybe.
  - WalterBright 10mo ago
    Cooling system.
    - jazzyjackson 10mo ago
      In some cases on-site natural gas generators have been used and those do make a lot of noise
  - al_borland 10mo ago
    I worked in a small DC (I think it had about 10k servers at its peak). The only time there was noise outside was if the generators were running due to an extended power outage or maintenance. We had a few trailer generators that were added on as capacity increased. Where I worked was right on the other side of the wall to one of the computer rooms and I don’t recall hearing anything. It only got loud when the door was physically opened to walk in the room, that noise was mostly from fans. I also toured one of our larger data centers, and even inside the small cube farm area it felt like a normal office. The noise only picked up once inside the room with the servers. Noise during construction would probably be worse than noise during operation.
    - alecco 10mo ago
      Part of the stop-gap plan of the White House is for DCs to run those backup generators at peak hours. That would be for years until the new power plants get online.
- 100pctremote 10mo ago
  The real estate is usually purchased only after the following requirements are assured, and there are many: Local and regional power grid robustness which includes: ability to service long-term capacity commitments, whether the developer will need to invest in and build substations themselves, and the legality and availability for on-site power generation (natural gas or electric). All of those requirements generally come after an assessment of local and state government appetite and willingness to cut red tape for such deals and provide favorable environmental policy.
- lovich 10mo ago
  Why would any company making data centers care about where they put them if the worst push back they get is less people than the company they employed to make sure janitors aren’t real employees of theirs, show up to protest? They have no reason to change their behavior because no one has caused them enough pain to change their behavior.
- dakna 10mo ago
  > So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways. The site of the old GM Fisher Body plant is a sixty acres brownfield. The proposed downtown data center location is a one acre unused parking lot. It is close enough to LBWL, Lansing's utility company for water/electricity, to reuse the generated heat [1]. I don't think this really compares to the 270 acres data center for OpenAi/Oracle planned in Saline Township, which will be connected to one of the few 345kV transmission lines in Michigan. [2] [1] https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-green-proposes-120-million-sustainable-data-center-investment https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-gree... [2] https://openinframap.org/#11.64/42.1244/-83.8008 https://openinframap.org/#11.64/42.1244/-83.8008
gweinberg 10mo ago
How is "more than 100" people "rallying" even remotely newsworthy? What's the threshold, three?
- nqzero 10mo ago
  there are dozens of us !
- __float 10mo ago
  Three people could be a group of friends. More than 100 is clearly different. Given that there are usually _zero_ people rallying in Lansing, this is notable enough for the local newspaper.
- cramcgrab 10mo ago
  Since the population is around 112k-114k people that would be around 111,900 people didn’t rally on the low end.
  - DaSHacka 10mo ago
    Lol, I prefer that version of the headline: "99.9% of residents did not show up to protest new datacenters in Michigan"
    - noitpmeder 10mo ago
      You could use that same statistic for literally every protest ever, doesn't mean they're not worth the causes
- vkou 10mo ago
  > What's the threshold, three? The threshold is an organization organizing it. Getting 100 people out demonstrates your political power to your supporters and the people you seek to influence. Getting 1,000 people demonstrates that you have more of it.
- evil-olive 10mo ago
  if you read the article instead of just criticizing the headline: > They listened to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticizing the lack of transparency with DTE, the utility that's associated with the Saline Township proposal, and legislators who protested tax breaks for data center projects. > ... > "We're talking about 1.4 gigawatts, which is, of course, enough to provide energy to a city of a million people," Nessel said. "I think we should be taking this extremely seriously, don't you? Do you guys trust DTE? Do you trust Open AI? Do we trust Oracle to look out for our best interests here in Michigan?" this wasn't just a random group of 100 people, they were organized enough to get the state AG as well as multiple state legislators to speak. seems fairly newsworthy to me.
zamadatix 10mo ago
https://archive.is/8uNAJ https://archive.is/8uNAJ
t1234s 10mo ago
I guess we have to build them in space.
- wongarsu 10mo ago
  At least in space the local residents don't complain
  - deflator 10mo ago
    The NIMBYs would find a way to
kmoser 10mo ago
The headline could be construed to mean the data centers will be installed in the Michigan Capitol. I would have written it as "More than 100 rally at Michigan Capitol against data centers".
- canyp 10mo ago
  The "at" does the trick there and the headline seems fine. Yours leaves no room for that kind of parse confusion, but I think English prefers to leave space/time adverbs and adverbial phrases at the end.
jeffbee 10mo ago
I was recently reminded how easily the public can be whipped into a frenzy of ignorance when I happened to revisit the Guardian article from 8 years ago that claimed data centers would use 20% of global electricity by 2025.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-...
- mmooss 10mo ago
  The article is about all internet-connected devices: "Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae." It's not crazy to think it might increase to 20%. How much is it really in 2025?
  - jeffbee 10mo ago
    The normally cited estimate of 2-4% already includes all networks, wired and wireless, and all client devices, mobile phones, and whatnot.
    - mmooss 10mo ago
      > normally cited estimate of 2-4% I haven't seen that. Interestingly it's less than 2015, per the article.
      - jeffbee 10mo ago
        The IEA periodically publishes these estimates. Some years they discuss client devices and/or networks. What's always been interesting to me in those reports is that mobile networks use about the same amount of power globally as data centers.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago
Amid polarization, opposition to Michigan data centers cuts across political lines https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/amid-polarization-opposition-to-michigan-data-centers-cuts-across-political-lines.html https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/amid-polarization-opposit... Data center proposed for Downtown Lansing would be first of its kind in US https://www.wilx.com/2025/11/05/data-center-proposed-downtown-lansing-would-be-first-its-kind-us/ https://www.wilx.com/2025/11/05/data-center-proposed-downtow... At least 16 sites eyed for data centers in Michigan amid AI boom. Here's where https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/at-least-16-sites-eyed-for-data-centers-in-michigan-amid-ai-boom-heres-where.html https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/at-least-16-sites-eyed-fo... "The man from Deep Green, who earlier repeatedly reiterated his intention to be a "good neighbor," responded by saying "I get it, you're Luddites." https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/opinion,171738 https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/opinion,171738 Residents protest data centers outside Michigan Capitol as debates rage on "One of the speakers, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, took the podium first." https://www.wilx.com/2025/12/16/data-center-protest-outside-michigan-capitol/ https://www.wilx.com/2025/12/16/data-center-protest-outside-... Michigan data center developments raise concerns over water and power use https://www.9and10news.com/2025/12/12/michigan-data-center-developments-raise-concerns-over-water-and-power-use/ https://www.9and10news.com/2025/12/12/michigan-data-center-d... Activists seeking a statewide moratorium on new AI data centers to rally in Lansing next week https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/activists-seeking-a-statewide-moratorium-on-new-ai-data-centers-to-rally-in-lansing-next-week/ https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/activists-seeking-a-state... At the same time, data center being proposed for Lansing, NY also drawing opposition from local residents https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/finger-lakes/blog/2025/10/emergency-meeting-scheduled-october-23-town-lansing-s-proposed https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/finger-lakes/blog/2025/1...

81 points by rmason 10mo ago

[flagged]

rmason 10mo ago

If I could give any advice to the people planning those data centers, they've got it all wrong. They assume that since they're noisy that we will plop them smack in the middle of some good farm land, surround them with corn fields and it solves the noise problem. In Michigan cities there is plenty of vacant land. Thousands of acres of vacant land. Here in Lansing the old GM owns two large plots where factories stood stamping out Oldsmobile's. There is all the power you would ever need. They're surrounded by other factories making possibly more noise than even a data centers fans. A small business community that has been decimated by the GM employees business in the neighborhood leaving. So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.

NedF 10mo ago
[dead]
itake 10mo ago
Can someone correct me if I am wrong? The noise problem is caused by fans (air cooling). Data centers cooled by water do not have noisy fans. My understand is modern data center designs use close loop water systems, eliminating noise and water table issues.
- xnx 10mo ago
  Closed loop water requires air fans.
- rmason 10mo ago
  You are correct the one that I referenced in Lansing's entertainment district is water cooled. They do not point out in newspaper accounts one of the reasons for its location there is they're supplying the heated water to the towns steam district. That heated water could possibly migrate chances of a electricity rate increase. But as several data center engineers I have spoken to agreed with me that if it was put on one of the many empty parking lots West of the Capitol it would be surrounded by mostly empty government buildings where a majority of state workers are working from home. They would still be able to access the steam district.
- zamadatix 10mo ago
  If it's true closed loop (i.e. no water evaporation to cool the loop) then how are they cooling the radiators without fans? Honestly, if there is a place it would have made sense to do evaporative cooling it was probably Michigan anyways... but I hope the closed loop option ends up working out just as well.
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    Unfortunately no. Evaporative cooling works best in low humidity areas. That's why it's so often deployed in deserts.
- quickthrowman 10mo ago
  Most data centers use evaporative cooling towers, actually. Adding them into a cooling loop almost doubles the efficiency, it’s a no-brainer.
Narkov 10mo ago
Nothing in the article talks about noise pollution. Their concern is about resource usage - water and electricity.
- vondur 10mo ago
  Is water an issue in Michigan? I thought they have plenty of water.
  - colechristensen 10mo ago
    They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
    - inferiorhuman 10mo ago
      Sure. With the suggestion of locating them on the sites of old factories: how does data center water usage compare to the factories?
    - jeffbee 10mo ago
      > over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. So, basically none?
      - butvacuum 10mo ago
        Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY. 700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure. 500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year. We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
cebert 10mo ago
As a Michigan resident, I can’t agree more. Also areas like Flint and Pontiac are in need of jobs and economic development.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Data centers create some construction jobs while they are being built but not much after that. A few people to keep an eye on things, swap out failed equipment, accept deliveries.
  - colechristensen 10mo ago
    Google's data center complex in Council Bluffs, IA is one of the largest in the world and it employs ... 250 people excluding temporary construction/expansion jobs.
    - thinkmassive 10mo ago
      Are those all Google employees, or does 250 also include long-term on-site contractors? I'm thinking security, maintenance, janitorial, etc
    - runako 10mo ago
      Adds about the same number of jobs as single Costco, except this particular Costco will increase your electricity bill even if you don't work there.
  - al_borland 10mo ago
    I think the news is misleading people on the number of jobs it will create. I mentioned data centers not creating many jobs to my dad, a news junkie in Michigan, and he said he read it would create over 1k jobs. That must have been including temporary construction jobs.
    - butvacuum 10mo ago
      Three shifts of 300 people to monitor and fix things. Maybe 4 shifts because of weekends.
yellow_lead 10mo ago
Only the xAI ones are noisy because they (illegally?) used mobile generators to meet electricity needs
eru 10mo ago
Are you suggesting the people who plan data centres are stupid and/or not profit maximising?
danans 10mo ago
> Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways. There will be few jobs created after construction is complete, and the ones created won't pay anything like typical tech comp.
- esseph 10mo ago
  Maybe you should calibrate your definition of what "typical tech comp" means and what roles that applies to, and at what companies. Median US Salary for a Data Center Technician is around 80k. Median US Salary is $63,360. Median household income is around $75,763 (Detroit CSA #s). There's a lot of people out of work right now.
  - runako 10mo ago
    How many people work in a modern data center?
    - al_borland 10mo ago
      Only as many as are needed to physically rack the hardware and do hand-on maintenance. The people actually using the servers shouldn’t be located on-site.
      - phil21 10mo ago
        A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time. They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.
    - daheza 10mo ago
      How much will the local energy prices rise due to the datacenter? More than that offset by the employees they hire I bet.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
I'd imagine it's because dragging the fiber to middle of nowhere can be pretty expensive
- namibj 10mo ago
  Worry about the leg-thick power cable not the pinky-thin fiber. The cost of the fiber itself basically doesn't matter relative to a data center itself.
  - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    I see that you know nothing about anything involved. The cost of cable is essentially irrelevant in both cases, the "everything else" is the expensive part. Power can be had from the closest high voltage line (and maybe even easier to get outside of the city) The fiber have to be dragged from either nearest point of presence (a building with many fiber connections coming to it from multiple companies to exchange traffic), or to whatever dark fiber infrastructure is available nearby. In city, that's usually not that hard, ISPs already "plumbed" most of the bigger cities with fiber infrastructure. Middle of the boonies, where we want the datacenters to go ? Dig, dig dig, get permissions for digging, get permission from everything around the ride from city's fiber infrastructure to the place in middle of nowhere, months or years in getting permissions, and red tape anywhere. There is probably some power close enough, or at the very least you can find a location close to power, but location close to fiber will if anything be some existing industrial centre, and even that might not be a sure bet. You might get lucky and get a permission to use existing poles to drag some fiber on them, but it's still PITA
    - namibj 10mo ago
      They are talking gigawatt. That pretty much implies dedicated long-distance transmission lines. The 1.4 GW they mention are very close to the full output of three mile island. This is not a small power situation that is done with existing power lines. And the moment you drag power in from 20+ miles away, you might as well just put fiber in there as it seems very easy given by how prevalent it is for long distance lines these past decade or two.
ekropotin 10mo ago
Genuine question - are DCs really that noisy from outside? If so what is the source of the noise?
- VTimofeenko 10mo ago
  Anecdata, but I was once on a tour of a colocation DC. Located in Vegas, near the old town in a basement of some office building. Completely unassuming from the outside. Inside it was a little loud, but not terribly so. Busy street level noise maybe.
- WalterBright 10mo ago
  Cooling system.
  - jazzyjackson 10mo ago
    In some cases on-site natural gas generators have been used and those do make a lot of noise
- al_borland 10mo ago
  I worked in a small DC (I think it had about 10k servers at its peak). The only time there was noise outside was if the generators were running due to an extended power outage or maintenance. We had a few trailer generators that were added on as capacity increased. Where I worked was right on the other side of the wall to one of the computer rooms and I don’t recall hearing anything. It only got loud when the door was physically opened to walk in the room, that noise was mostly from fans. I also toured one of our larger data centers, and even inside the small cube farm area it felt like a normal office. The noise only picked up once inside the room with the servers. Noise during construction would probably be worse than noise during operation.
  - alecco 10mo ago
    Part of the stop-gap plan of the White House is for DCs to run those backup generators at peak hours. That would be for years until the new power plants get online.
100pctremote 10mo ago
The real estate is usually purchased only after the following requirements are assured, and there are many: Local and regional power grid robustness which includes: ability to service long-term capacity commitments, whether the developer will need to invest in and build substations themselves, and the legality and availability for on-site power generation (natural gas or electric). All of those requirements generally come after an assessment of local and state government appetite and willingness to cut red tape for such deals and provide favorable environmental policy.
lovich 10mo ago
Why would any company making data centers care about where they put them if the worst push back they get is less people than the company they employed to make sure janitors aren’t real employees of theirs, show up to protest? They have no reason to change their behavior because no one has caused them enough pain to change their behavior.
dakna 10mo ago
> So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways. The site of the old GM Fisher Body plant is a sixty acres brownfield. The proposed downtown data center location is a one acre unused parking lot. It is close enough to LBWL, Lansing's utility company for water/electricity, to reuse the generated heat [1]. I don't think this really compares to the 270 acres data center for OpenAi/Oracle planned in Saline Township, which will be connected to one of the few 345kV transmission lines in Michigan. [2] [1] https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-green-proposes-120-million-sustainable-data-center-investment https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-gree... [2] https://openinframap.org/#11.64/42.1244/-83.8008 https://openinframap.org/#11.64/42.1244/-83.8008

gweinberg 10mo ago

How is "more than 100" people "rallying" even remotely newsworthy? What's the threshold, three?

nqzero 10mo ago
there are dozens of us !
__float 10mo ago
Three people could be a group of friends. More than 100 is clearly different. Given that there are usually _zero_ people rallying in Lansing, this is notable enough for the local newspaper.
cramcgrab 10mo ago
Since the population is around 112k-114k people that would be around 111,900 people didn’t rally on the low end.
- DaSHacka 10mo ago
  Lol, I prefer that version of the headline: "99.9% of residents did not show up to protest new datacenters in Michigan"
  - noitpmeder 10mo ago
    You could use that same statistic for literally every protest ever, doesn't mean they're not worth the causes
vkou 10mo ago
> What's the threshold, three? The threshold is an organization organizing it. Getting 100 people out demonstrates your political power to your supporters and the people you seek to influence. Getting 1,000 people demonstrates that you have more of it.
evil-olive 10mo ago
if you read the article instead of just criticizing the headline: > They listened to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticizing the lack of transparency with DTE, the utility that's associated with the Saline Township proposal, and legislators who protested tax breaks for data center projects. > ... > "We're talking about 1.4 gigawatts, which is, of course, enough to provide energy to a city of a million people," Nessel said. "I think we should be taking this extremely seriously, don't you? Do you guys trust DTE? Do you trust Open AI? Do we trust Oracle to look out for our best interests here in Michigan?" this wasn't just a random group of 100 people, they were organized enough to get the state AG as well as multiple state legislators to speak. seems fairly newsworthy to me.

zamadatix 10mo ago

https://archive.is/8uNAJ https://archive.is/8uNAJ

t1234s 10mo ago

I guess we have to build them in space.

wongarsu 10mo ago
At least in space the local residents don't complain
- deflator 10mo ago
  The NIMBYs would find a way to

kmoser 10mo ago

The headline could be construed to mean the data centers will be installed in the Michigan Capitol. I would have written it as "More than 100 rally at Michigan Capitol against data centers".

canyp 10mo ago
The "at" does the trick there and the headline seems fine. Yours leaves no room for that kind of parse confusion, but I think English prefers to leave space/time adverbs and adverbial phrases at the end.

jeffbee 10mo ago

I was recently reminded how easily the public can be whipped into a frenzy of ignorance when I happened to revisit the Guardian article from 8 years ago that claimed data centers would use 20% of global electricity by 2025.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-...

mmooss 10mo ago
The article is about all internet-connected devices: "Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae." It's not crazy to think it might increase to 20%. How much is it really in 2025?
- jeffbee 10mo ago
  The normally cited estimate of 2-4% already includes all networks, wired and wireless, and all client devices, mobile phones, and whatnot.
  - mmooss 10mo ago
    > normally cited estimate of 2-4% I haven't seen that. Interestingly it's less than 2015, per the article.
    - jeffbee 10mo ago
      The IEA periodically publishes these estimates. Some years they discuss client devices and/or networks. What's always been interesting to me in those reports is that mobile networks use about the same amount of power globally as data centers.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago

Amid polarization, opposition to Michigan data centers cuts across political lines https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/amid-polarization-opposition-to-michigan-data-centers-cuts-across-political-lines.html https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/amid-polarization-opposit... Data center proposed for Downtown Lansing would be first of its kind in US https://www.wilx.com/2025/11/05/data-center-proposed-downtown-lansing-would-be-first-its-kind-us/ https://www.wilx.com/2025/11/05/data-center-proposed-downtow... At least 16 sites eyed for data centers in Michigan amid AI boom. Here's where https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/at-least-16-sites-eyed-for-data-centers-in-michigan-amid-ai-boom-heres-where.html https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/at-least-16-sites-eyed-fo... "The man from Deep Green, who earlier repeatedly reiterated his intention to be a "good neighbor," responded by saying "I get it, you're Luddites." https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/opinion,171738 https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/opinion,171738 Residents protest data centers outside Michigan Capitol as debates rage on "One of the speakers, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, took the podium first." https://www.wilx.com/2025/12/16/data-center-protest-outside-michigan-capitol/ https://www.wilx.com/2025/12/16/data-center-protest-outside-... Michigan data center developments raise concerns over water and power use https://www.9and10news.com/2025/12/12/michigan-data-center-developments-raise-concerns-over-water-and-power-use/ https://www.9and10news.com/2025/12/12/michigan-data-center-d... Activists seeking a statewide moratorium on new AI data centers to rally in Lansing next week https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/activists-seeking-a-statewide-moratorium-on-new-ai-data-centers-to-rally-in-lansing-next-week/ https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/activists-seeking-a-state... At the same time, data center being proposed for Lansing, NY also drawing opposition from local residents https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/finger-lakes/blog/2025/10/emergency-meeting-scheduled-october-23-town-lansing-s-proposed https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/finger-lakes/blog/2025/1...