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The moral panic over data centres is foolish
- variety8675 1mo agoThe actual public outage is driven by fear of what happens to the economy if all work is automated
- Vosporos 1mo agoIt means that it works.
- verdverm 1mo agoWhat does "it works" mean in this context? Are we prioritizing short-term political wins at cost of long-term competitiveness? Why are non-Western populations so excited by Ai while the West is eating fud? I suspect the data center thing has become popular because it's been a long time since people have felt like they can effect change in government policy. Details and nuance are irrelevant, there are larger, underlying forces at work
- sublinear 1mo agoEveryone is trying to figure out the chess board not realizing that they are being completely distracted by a simple game of chess. :) In other words, since the USA endlessly debates everything, you might as well put out messaging that creates more FUD so that it opens up more chances they'll believe anything. The dissonant mental state fuels the consumption that drives the economy.
- nateglims 1mo ago> Why are non-Western populations so excited by Ai Are they excited? Or do they just not have political control at a local level?
- skeledrew 1mo agoI know in Singapore that they're pretty excited. They're teaching it in schools and the public is generally responding well, according to someone I know who's a citizen there.
- Grombobulous 1mo agoNon-Western populations (really, talking about China here) do not live in a democracy. The government centrally plans where they build things like data centers and homes and there is very little the populace can do about it. You cannot own land in China, you can only lease it. You can't even really talk politics in China in anything close to the same way you're allowed to in the US. People in China are also generally more excited about progress since it has actively improved their livelihood and wealth over the last few decades rather than slowly eroding it like it has in many Western countries. The government there makes legitimate investments in very visible and beneficial public works projects. Why would you be unenthusiastic about progress when you've been getting subways and high speed rail and cheap luxurious EVs everywhere for the last 20 years? I find this article incredibly weak, glossing over a number of legitimate concerns brought up by data center opponents. This sentence in particular is pretty egregious: > In any case, even the noise worry is overstated: many viral videos of supposed AI data centre noise are really Bitcoin mines, not state-of-the-art hyperscaler facilities. Really? You think people are building Bitcoin mines, in 2026? Please. Let's also be clear here: AI data centers could be a wonderful thing if we had a government that was legitimately focused on shoring up the national grid, transitioning to renewable energy, and building nuclear power plants. You know who is doing that? China: with more nuclear power plant projects underway than the rest of the world combined. Instead, the US has an administration that started another middle east war for no reason resulting in higher oil prices, cancels renewable energy projects and permits left and right, and seems hell-bent on moving backwards in every way possible. Electricity prices in many states have gone up by double digit percentages. I don't see that happening in China. I don't blame anyone for being against data centers, even if it is "FUD."
- verdverm 1mo agoI'm not sure where you are pulling that bitcoin statement from, presenting it as a quote, but it is not mine. My understanding is the gas turbine generators are the thing creating noise. We've had data centers for decades, noise is only a problem this year, so something new is going on, extrapolation from isolated incidents to broad brush strokes
- 1mo ago
- jltsiren 1mo agoThe West is not a single monolith. Attitudes towards data centers vary from country to country. As does the perception of how much influence people have over the government. The actual issue, as far as I see it, is the financialization of capitalism. When businesses prioritize creating value to the shareholders over creating value to the society, people naturally care less about their success. The degree of financialization also varies from country to country.
- CamperBob2 1mo agoYes, appealing to foolishness has proven far more effective than even its most ardent advocates would have expected a decade or so ago. There are a lot of fools out there, and their favorite recreational activity, besides being fooled, is voting.
- goldenarm 1mo agohttps://archive.is/gPfih https://archive.is/gPfih
- jpgvm 1mo agoNIMBYs are the enemy of all that is good in the world. No datacenters isn't about AI or even resources like water or power, it's mostly about real-estate and housing prices as usual. If we listened to NIMBYs we would have no new infrastructure, no high density housing, no public transport.... oh wait.
- neuroticnews25 1mo agoWhy would a huge industrial scale investment be in anybody's backyard? Is this a US thing? It seems intuitive it belongs in a sparsly populated area.
- lbriner 1mo agoI think a large part is being close enough to existing utilities to save the installation costs of 40 miles of cable, telecomms etc (all duplicated of course). However, some data centres are built in the middle of nowhere but that is potentially then a nature problem because why spoil this nice countryside with a massive non-descript building? I like Copenhill (https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/copenhagen/planning/copenhill-gdk1088237 https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/copenhagen/planning/copenhil...), where they decided that waste handling is not nice so why not make it nice by building a ski slope on it. I suspect that a bit more creativity could make people want data centres (free heating and hot water anybody? Hot spring baths? Free hosting for local schools and charities?)
- bayindirh 1mo ago> or even resources like water or power I wonder, do you know how much energy or water is required to run a datacenter with direct liquid cooled systems? Not the SOTA AI data centers which are popping up like mushrooms, a general ballpark is enough. This is not a loaded question. Given your knowledge, you must be knowing much more than majority of HN.
- jpgvm 1mo agoI actually happen to know a lot about this! I have been in and around datacenters for ~16yrs and I work on direct liquid cooled hardware at $DAY_JOB. Back when I was running my own startup I moved to Mascot, Sydney to be near Equinix SY3 that was being built which we had bought a decent chunk of committed capacity in. Mascot was originally an industrial area but was gentrified a lot over the last 20ish years but the datacenters, meat packers etc are all still there. It really adds to the charm of the place in a lot of ways, warehouses/factories that have been converted to cafes and breweries. Which is to say I don't think living near a DC is bad at all, they aren't very loud and they just look like big warehouses with lots of lights, cameras and no windows. Oh and security dudes. Anyways. Yes. The hardware I am working at $DAY_JOB is all direct liquid cooled. The coolant that actually cools the hardware is closed loop, it's not expended. Which means you don't actually use any of it and it's considered good for the entire life of the hardware. I normally don't directly talk about $DAY_JOB things because there are pretty strict rules so I can only use publically referenced sources but you can read a little bit about the coolant we use in this article [1]. The facility loop though is usually what people are worried about. A lot of datacentres that were built in low humidity environments use evaporative cooling which does indeed use a ton of water. However most data centers in more humid environments don't and either use loops that recycle the water but dump the heat (i.e rivers/lakes) or use closed loop systems with radiators etc. It's worth mentioning though that evaporative cooling is extremely power efficient vs most closed loop solutions so there is a tradeoff here. I don't think Google could achieve their fleetwide PUE (Power Usage Efficiency, basically measurement of how much power goes to things in a DC that isn't a computer) numbers without relying on it heavily. Given the difficulties getting DCs approved in much of the world right now and the backlog on generation capacity (i.e power) almost all modern DCs are being built to use as little water as possible. To give you an idea I think evaporative cooling of the type you would find in a state of the art Google DC with a PUE of ~1.1ish might use 1-1.1L of water for every kWh of actual equipment load (this is a back of the napkin estimate, don't hold me to it). Conversely true closed loop will use approximately zero. So yeah, evaporative is a big waster of water especially at GW scale. 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/nvidia-announces-liquid-cooling-system-that-runs-hotter-than-a-hot-tub-promises-to-reduce-electricity-consumption-and-cut-water-use-by-up-to-100-percent-but-sustainability-challenges-remain https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/nvid...
- gjsman-1000 1mo ago“Moral panic” is just an academic jargon term for “settle down peasants.” “A backlash fuelled by misinformation and misunderstanding” is also just an academic jargon term for “my vision is superior, anyone who disagrees is out of stupidity, if they understood me they would agree.”
- sgt101 1mo ago[flagged]
- gjsman-1000 1mo agoNah, make the cost of living unaffordable, make the homes and utilities unaffordable, pollute the water, and they’re preventing the kids from existing in the first place. It’s cleaner.
- sgt101 29d agoneat
- bloaf 1mo agoA lot of the anti-data-center rhetoric is "windmills kill birds" or "dihydrogen monoxide" style fearmongering, not an actual debate.
- gjsman-1000 1mo agoNo, it’s everyone watched the More Perfect Union video, saw sludge coming out of their faucets and low decibel hums ruining sleep, and decided to fight when peasants aren’t allowed to fight. Between this and Flock Cameras, tech isn’t making themselves the noble savior on a white horse and being a good neighbor when moving in.
- frumplestlatz 1mo ago> it’s everyone watched the More Perfect Union video Sure sounds like foolish moral panic. Many of the responses here so far would be perfectly at home on bluesky.
- WhrRTheBaboons 1mo ago>the economist
- DANmode 1mo agoLeave a decipherable comment, please.
- measurablefunc 1mo agoThe banks will continue financing their construction so it doesn't matter how much people morally panic about it unless it becomes illegal to sell corporate bonds to banks they (Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc) will continue building data centers.
- Sharlin 1mo agoThere's this thing called zoning.
- measurablefunc 1mo agoWhat about it? Data centers are not built in residential zones.
- Sharlin 1mo agoI don't know where you live, but at least around here you don't build anything bigger than a garden shed without the municipality's permission. Something massive and externality-y like a data center is going to go through all the municipal planning steps, a multi-year process, even if wherever you want to build it is already zoned for industrial use.
- measurablefunc 1mo agoStill don't see what that has to do with what I wrote? Texas has a pipeline of these things set up to go & the Memphis one is still out of code because of the gas turbines they're using. They're going to keep building them because the banks keep financing them regardless of the regulatory burden.
- r_lee 1mo agowhat about the videos of residents showing decibel meters going off and water pressure dropping? just an anecdote but what exactly do local residents gain here? a handful of permanent maintenance jobs?
- bayindirh 1mo ago> a handful of permanent maintenance jobs? No. Permanent sleep deprivation and probably tinnitus. It's sad, really. Poorly designed cooling infrastructure is indeed noisy. There are lower noise versions exist, but they are expensive, and I don't think they can be that quieter to make a difference at that scale.
- quantummagic 1mo agoOf course those are real issues that should be addressed. Just like if a factory producing bicycles is running all night and keeping you awake. But it's not something that should be concerning for anyone outside the area. It's not an existential crisis, just a local nuisance.
- bix6 1mo agoHow is it not an existential crisis when it’s literally reshaping financial markets? That’s not just a local nuisance.
- quantummagic 1mo agoThat's a completely separate issue (if it is one at all), but I was addressing the specific concerns in the OPs question.
- bayindirh 1mo ago> But it's not something that should be concerning for anyone outside the area. Of course. Esp. for the bigger datacenters which generate their own power and release large amounts of emissions to the atmosphere. It's good that that air never moves and all this emission stays inside the cube formed by the ground, four borders of the datacenter and personal airspace ceiling prescribed by the governments. Given that the datacenter operators run air purifiers and give the filtered out emissions to government (or licensed 3rd parties) for conversion to carbon credits, there's no harm done. Just some local noise nuisance, and maybe some heat, but all of them are manageable. Residents can use earplugs and more powerful air conditioners to restore or surpass their previous life quality. This is not only progress, but how one changes the world for the better.
- jedberg 1mo agoI have a lot of left leaning non-tech friends. They are all very much against AI data centers. I've built AI data centers, and I keep trying to educate them, but they just won't listen. The water is mostly part of a closed system. Sure, you need a lot to build one, but once it's running it's pretty water efficient. The lack of green power is a problem, but as the article points out, you now have a large customer subsidizing the base cost of delivery, since they are only one delivery point, and they are financing new sources of power, which if properly regulated would be green power. The noise is an issue, I will admit that. As is the fact that a lot of the power is coming from non-green sources. But the government could easily fix these problems with regulations that apply broadly, not just to datacenters.
- plazmatic 1mo ago[dead]
- lc9er 1mo agoCool. Then then you live next to one.
- jedberg 1mo agoNo thanks, they are loud. I even called that out. But no one should be living next to them. Those people need to get their local government to regulate noise from all buildings. The companies won't do it on their own. (This is part of why I no longer help build them, because when I asked about reducing noise and using green power I was laughed at).
- lbriner 1mo agoThey had an article about Australia embracing AI data centers to be suppliers of the future and not just customers and one big pull is "the vast amounts of land in Australia" then said that one of them is being built within 100m of the nearest suburban house and 200m of a school. It seems with all the other battles to fight, that moving it 2km down the road and surrounding it with trees and parkland would knock the noise argument out of the window. At least in the US and Australia that really do have vast amounts of open space.
- rjurney 1mo agoLocal outrage over construction is the only protest people have against their wholesale replacement at work. They're totally fucked, and you know it. And you aren't. Have empathy.
- vekntksijdhric 1mo agoThe title was cropped "The moral panic over data centres is foolish, filthy peasants!"
- gjsman-1000 1mo ago“Filthy little hobbits, their moral panic about serving Sauron is wholly uncalled for.”
- CPLX 1mo agoMemo to anyone in the tech community who doesn’t agree with this: People fucking hate you and don’t trust you and are convinced, not without reason, that you have the specific goal and intention of destroying their way of life and ability to provide for their families. They also feel like they were never consulted in any of this and that nobody is representing their interests. You can agree or disagree with that point of view, but unless you thrive on ignorance you might as well get your head around the fact that it’s likely a majority view in this country by now. Consider for a moment trying to figure out why that is the case rather than pretending it’s not true or that it’s a mass delusion.
- Sharlin 1mo agoAgreed. Might not be a bad idea to fire up the good old-fashioned empathy cells and try to understand the problem from the opponents' perspective.
- unified101 1mo agoLets say I like AI it makes my life easy and I don't mind datacenters. You seem to have a problem with capitalism. Not AI or datacenters. Capitalism isnt working right now. Ask for that to be abolished. Don't point your finger at a genuinely useful and accessible technology.
- agentultra 1mo ago> just about everything in modern life, from streaming Netflix to running a dishwasher, consumes water at levels that can be portrayed as wasteful by hair-shirt environmentalists. Ad-hominems in an Economist article. This reads more like an opinion piece than reporting. There are plenty of documented problems with water usage of data centres. Some can use it efficiently but it costs more to do so and many (most?) do not. We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres. Don’t think many people are going to read this and think, “Gosh, I was a fool!”
- judge2020 1mo ago> Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker lol
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo agoDark pattern Only need JS for the Datadome domains in order to get the Datadome cookie. No JS is required to read economist.com and ad blockers do not need to be disabled JS is optional for reading economist.com
- q2wahj 1mo ago"Moral panic"? Did they read Michael Tracey? First of all, there are reasons apart from pollution, rising electricity prices and global warming: These things make noise. Noise bad. Noise very bad for health. Maybe if post from Economist or Spectator villa no know noise! Thanks for your attention to this matter and please continue to eat cake.
- j45 1mo agoGreat another economist post of non-technology people talking about tech. That's worked great for the datacenter misinformation so far. There's not even an author on this article. But you can listen to an ai narrated version of it.
- Gander5739 1mo ago> There's not even an author on this article. The Economist has anonymous writers for almost every article.
- timmg 1mo agoI was actually pretty worried that the anti-datacenter backlash would stunt and important industry (for the US). But I think the effect will be that the companies building them will "sweeten" the deal for the local towns where they are building -- probably by way of taxes. And while that will be a drag on their development (by adding costs), the scale won't be bad enough to really hurt. And in that sense, everyone wins. The locales will be happy to have the extra resources. And the ones that don't take the "bribe" -- or whatever you want to call it -- won't get datacenters. (But I do agree that panic is overblown and counterproductive.)
- 9cb14c1ec0 1mo ago> "sweeten" the deal for the local towns where they are building Yes. And datacenter companies have to foolish to slow-walk doing this. When you are building a 10 to 50 billion dollar construction project, it may be worth giving the local town 100 million (plus 10k directly to every resident) to do with as they please, and it would certainly grease the wheels.
- jpgvm 1mo agoThey are slow walking it because you simply can't build the generation fast enough anyway. It's also why you are seeing a lot of project with their own generation plants on site, either stuff like the SpaceX/X/AI (I dunno what you call it man) datacenters - i.e very adhoc methane stuff or proper LNG generators ala Meta. This is mostly an America problem right now because that is where everyone wants to build the DCs and it's the market with the most stagnant generation: https://en.macromicro.me/collections/26367/electricity/142474/us-vs-china-total-electricity-generation https://en.macromicro.me/collections/26367/electricity/14247...
- cmoski 1mo agoEverybody wins? Come on...
- cineticdaffodil 1mo ago[dead]
- nklp 1mo agoRelevant video from Benn Jordan investigating data center noise that the article glosses over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
- loudoundata 1mo agoAs someone who’s lived in and near Loudoun county for well over two decades, it’s very difficult to take the anti-data center arguments at all seriously. It’s all coming from people who never heard the phrase “data center” before six months ago.
- goldenarm 1mo agoThe article dismisses everything without sourcing anything. US electricity is 40% more expensive since 2022 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 Some AI datacenters can indeed be heard a mile away https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/28/datacenters-sound-pollution-lawsuits https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/28/datacenters-... Amazon's new Texas AI data center could become the biggest CO2 polluter in the US https://www.techradar.com/pro/amazons-new-texas-ai-data-center-could-become-the-biggest-co2-polluter-in-the-us-7-65gw-facility-gets-permit-to-spread-33-million-tons-of-annual-greenhouse-gases-despite-amazons-clean-energy-pledge https://www.techradar.com/pro/amazons-new-texas-ai-data-cent...
- frustratedlazy 1mo agoFYI - EIA has analysis on the energy increase - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 Relative to data center growth, the correlation doesn't match - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-center-us https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen... More analysis here - https://www.wri.org/insights/whats-driving-us-electricity-prices https://www.wri.org/insights/whats-driving-us-electricity-pr... But TL;DR - sounds like in the northeast / PJM it's load increases, in North Dakota increased load is causing drops in prices, California it's mostly from wildfire mitigation + insurance, natural gas oscillating across the US is causing price changes as well.
- goldenarm 1mo agoThank you, your comment was more informative than the economist article
- bethekidyouwant 1mo agoThe gas generators can be heard a mile away… protest gas generators?
- downrightmike 1mo ago
- sajithdilshan 1mo agoI think the hatred towards the data centers stems from the anger and frustration that has been caused by the white collar job replacement done by AI. We have an entire generation of young people that went to college and got a degree hoping that they would be able to get a good job and live a comfortable life. However, that's not the case anymore and the fact that almost all entry level jobs are replaced by AI has created this sentiment among people that somehow AI is evil. The problem is not that AI is evil, but most of the people would have to learn new skills and adapt because the profession or job they trained at college doesn't exists anymore. Data Centers have existed way before mainstream AI. Everyone would binge watch the latest season of popular shows of Netflix and won't even bat an eye thinking how much water that has wasted.
- milkshakes 1mo ago> The problem is not that AI is evil, but most of the people would have to learn new skills and adapt because the profession or job they trained at college doesn't exists anymore. isn't the problem then capitalism? the promise of AI is to deliver efficiencies, leverage, and consequent surplus. AI does not itself allocate the surplus.
- sajithdilshan 1mo ago> isn't the problem then capitalism? Nope, capitalism is not perfect, but it has lifted billions of people out of poverty and elevated their living standards. The hatred towards capitalism is as irrational as the hatred towards data centers. If you really want to find something to hate and blame all your problems, then blame it on corruption and incompetent politicians.
- milkshakes 1mo agoi'm not blaming all problems here, i'm blaming the allocation of surplus. it does seem at least at surface level that this is driven by capitalism?
- 1mo ago
- nateglims 1mo agoI think one thing that muddles this in online discussions is that there are many voices saying many things about AI, Data Centers, etc. It's easy believe that everyone involved in obstructing data centers is some sort of NIMBY crank that believes fake news about electricity or water usage. But if you look at reporting from people like Jasmine Sun who visited these towns, the actual activists are a lot more sophisticated than tech forums think. There's a lot of examples of companies failing to deliver things they promised at this level like the FoxConn complex in Wisconsin. Making city leaders sign NDAs doesn't help this. People are more skeptical of future tax revenue claims and it's hard to sell a direct benefit of the AI itself when you spent two years talking about eliminating all white collar jobs. The trust just isn't there. Given the classical liberal philosophy of The Economist, this just reads like scolding when their world-view is falling out of favor. Luckily for AI boosters, I think data center builders are adapting to reality.
- tolerance 1mo agoIssues like this are proving the Horseshoe theory right.
- polotics 1mo agowhat's moral panic got to do with inflated energy prices, noise, and polluted water?
- thrance 1mo agoPeople despise datacenters for what they represent: a contemptuous capital class who despises humanism, democracy, art and ecology, and is openly working to screw you over and dismantle all that is good in the world. I'm barely exaggerating. Therefore any argument about them being "not so bad" in the water/noise/energy department is worthless. You can't Spock your way out of it. People feel AI, in its current incarnation (A tool of the oligarchy), only brings negative value to the world. Hence they're opposed to its avatars, like datacenters or the anti-features popping in every app and websites.
- duxup 1mo agoWe have been building them for decades without problems at the scale we’re talking about them now. There’s a few in my area that have huge green space around them as per local government and I’d love to live near them…. You got big open green space, trees, wetlands. One I know of is home to Sandhill cranes every summer. Just do the thing, right.
- general1465 1mo agoI think it should not be a big deal to build datacenters in desert states like Arizona, Nevada or all the way in Alaska. Building of datacenters was actually one of the reasons why USA wanted/wants to have Greenland.
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo agoThis is contrarian silicon valley techbro nonsense.
- sleight42 1mo ago"The moral panic over data centres is foolish", says editorial in a news journal that is foremost about making money. The rest of us pay higher and higher electrical bills because of data centers. Data centers create jobs during construction but few jobs after. Strategically, though, the US is cooked if we don't keep ahead of the pack. Hell of a tradeoff.
- silexia 1mo agoThe extinction of humanity from wayward AI is not foolish.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo ago"More prosaically, data centres pay huge tax bills, helping fund schools, libraries and police stations." https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/state-losses-from-data-center-tax-breaks-top-3-billion-annually https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/state-l... https://www.edweek.org/technology/rising-use-of-ai-in-schools-comes-with-big-downsides-for-students/2025/10 https://www.edweek.org/technology/rising-use-of-ai-in-school...