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That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters. Everyone hates AI, and Elon absolutely screwed Memphis, and everyone thinks anything with more than 10 computers in it is going to be an xAI monstrosity. There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.
I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
HN forgets how edge computing or even Cloudflare works.
> Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants
Ground floor retail in every datacenter.
More nail salons, a Halloween store open for two months out of the year, and boutique bakeries (that will be out of business in 6 months).
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2026/07/27/hawthorne-race-cours...
Isn't Chicago filled with rail yards full of humming diesel locomotives? I couldn't think of a bigger eyesore. You can't plant trees in a rail yard.
The anti-datacenter hysteria reeks of the "5G mind control cancer machines" of a few years ago.
Why not?
It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise
For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country).
But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
50 MW for 69k square feet definitely points to relatively dense GPUs. Regardless of what DC Blox might have built five years ago, everyone knows what kind of datacenter is going to be booked solid right now.
But that is only a corner of the property that DC Blox acquired. Other documents filed during the permitting process include their long-term plan for the property, and that's where the 50 MW number comes from-- two buildings totaling 345k square feet of data center space, a 72k square foot electrical substation, plus support facilities (parking, guard houses, etc.).
Or will it just incentivize harsher treatment of noncompliant parts of the population?
Or just pushing these things far from urban areas where they probably should have been already?
Probably a bit of each, and some more I'm not thinking of.
Although that would be exponentially worse in terms of electricity and resource use, etc. - instead 1 TPU handling x,000 customers per month, now you’ve got n,000 separate devices, where the vast majority of them are idle the vast majority of the time, but even then without all of the more efficient power, etc that DCs offer.
> urban areas
The photo at the very top of the OP article shows the proposed DC location does not appear urban, nor anywhere near even single-story Main Street type density.
I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Virtualization isn't new, it's a technology from the 2000s. I think we are well beyond absorbing any spare capacity that the efficiencies of virtualization squeezed out at this point
So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opposition has to use its teeth, not just bare them.
The whole area is (1) office parks (including large parking lots), (2) warehouses/light manuf'ing/"big box" stores, (3) enormous(!) rail yard (freight trains), (4) the Nashville Zoo.
I don't have any skin in this fight, but I think it is a missed opportunity. The two sides should negotiate an agreement that is acceptable to both sides. Example: Can they do a land swap? Can they limit the power draw and noise levels? Can they promise not to generate any power onsite (gas turbines, etc.)? Can they promise to cover the data center roof with solar panels? Can they build higher density (imagine double/triple/quad height data center), but only in the furthest quadrant of land from the zoo, then promise to infill the remaining land with dense forest (or donate it to the zoo)?
I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.
It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.
Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.
But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).
It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.
I was for them and now I'm against them until they pay for their own electricity.
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
Not once instance of these datacenters has proven to be beneficial for the communities and economies they're located in.
Further, electicity price hikes seems like a bad prospect when inflation is already rampant. If you want a datacenter, offer your house for the space instead.
"The Metropolitan Council is the legislative authority of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, the nation’s first, fully consolidated city-county government, established in 1963. The Vice Mayor serves as the president of the Council, which is comprised of 35 district members and five members serving at-large."
https://www.nashville.gov/departments/council
San Francisco is consolidated in 1856 and according to Wikipedia, a century before Nashville (1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#cite_note-Coy_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee
Which might be true? But it's a really hyper-specific claim that's far less impressive than it first sounds.
This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”
But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.
Yes it is, it's both of those things. Consolidated city/county governments are not a weird oddity that no one knows how to handle, they're not super common but they're not governmental arrangements from Neptune, either
Hats off to whoever is stoking this. It’s witchcraft trials levels of hysteria.
Or for your suggestion to “fix healthcare” - how and by whom? The solutions that those on the left push are anathema to 1 of the 2 major parties in the U.S., and the party which currently controls all of the branches of government.
My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar thing for our distribution hub, it’s south of downtown kind of in the outskirts and in an economically struggling area. Same for industrial areas, it’s usually something that’s zoned to a particular area so residential neighborhoods aren’t really affected. It’s not land where the community may benefit more by literally anything else (sometimes even a Walmart is better than a datacenter). I assume that’s where this is all headed, cities need to roll out their long term vision of where datacenters fit into their city, if at all. Until then, it’s all these small battles and the information used by opponents doesn’t really matter. If enough people don’t want it, it should probably go somewhere else. This is not serving any community benefit so I don’t see any reason why it has to exist where the developers want it to.
Expecting rational opposition is actually irrational. They just don’t want it. The why is varied and probably based more on emotion than anything else.
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
The photo at the very top of the article shows an incredibly low density area. If someone was expecting to see urban density, or even single story main street density, it isn’t in the location shown in the photo.
This sounds like a pretty good argument against golf courses. Not sure why you think this comparison put the water consumption of DCs into perspective, to me it just puts the water consumption of golf courses into perspective.
There is not a concerted effort to build thousand upon thousands of stockyards across the globe.
Stockyards wont increase the planets reliance of oil, since green technologies don't scale that fast. Same planet that feeling the effect of climate change quite clearly.
All for close to zero upside for the surrounding community. At least the stockyard would have given you cheaper meat. What are data centers going to give? Discount tokens?
That's why your stockyard does not have the same pushback.
I think these corporations do a lot of harm to their own arguments.
[1] - https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/data-center-develop...
Golf courses are a common example of wasteful water use.
Try to build as many new golf courses as there are new data centers going up and you might get a similar reaction...
look, i use llms for some work and for some hobby projects, but lets not pretend like the companies behind the llm bubble would ever fight fair. that would be naive to an extreme.
When we look at data we actually have [0], we can see for example AWS data centers in Oregon consumed 284,000,000 gallons of water in 2024. By their own estimate 100% of that water is typically consumed in the summer months of June, July, August, and Sept. These are also the months that farms use the most irrigation, lawns use the most, etc. Also, keep in mind that Eastern Oregon has ideal weather for evaporative cooling (specifically low humidity). Evap cooling is used for data centers in more humid parts of the country/world and can be significantly less water efficient.
The average Oregon resident uses 80 gallons of water per day, or 29,200 gallons of water annually. And if you calculate it out In 2024, AWS in Oregon used water equivalent to 9726 residents' annual usage. Is that a lot? What if you add all the other data center operators in the area? I don't know. Is they causing unrealistic pressure on aquifiers and the Columbia River watershed? I don't know either. Is the trade off of water consumption for data centers worth it? I'm not really sure how to answer these questions, but I think it starts with data center operators and their utilities being more open about their usage. Today data center operators like to compare their newest DC designs to golf courses and household use and it's not showing the full story.
[0] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/get-involved/Documents/2026-03...
Since more precision remedies are off the table, all that's left are gross mechanisms like bans and eminent domain.
Nobody sane would accede to admitting a new community member who is a priori immune to local laws.
However that doesn’t mean that people don’t have real grievances, even if misplaced.
I tend to agree with your sentiment, I think datacenters are getting more shit than they deserve, but there are better arguments to be made.
With patience, love and a bit of humor. X
this is after a strong push for clean energy options like a nuclear plant, solar, and wind by, well everyone, even rural communities who don't want the ambient pollution of those gas plants. but given this 'demand' for data centers, that transition to clean energy is all but abandoned. each of those turbines have an estimated lifetime use of 25-30 years [3] so we'll be emitting multiple times the amount of carbon we do today until at least the 2060s and all of it funded predominantly by taxpayers
if you're not a believer in what people now call 'communist' politics such as believing that anthropogenic climate change is real, public health initiatives save lives, and vaccines are effective then I suppose you'd find this all very good and silly
regardless, claiming anti-data center organizing comes from astro-turfing is exactly the opposite of what's happening. if you went to a single hearing or were engaged with your local community politics, you'd see as much
[1](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/georgia-power...) [2](https://energyandpolicy.org/georgia-psc-incumbents-majority-...) [3](https://rmi.org/resources/you-might-be-paying-for-a-worthles...)
This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.
This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.
[1] https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-to-resume-construction-on-wa...
*increasingly nonspecific. See [1] for example
[1] https://floodlightnews.org/ai-data-centers-texas-pollution-l...
Liquid cooling pulls heat away from the chips. Evaporative cooling takes it out of the building.
There are alternatives, but evaporative cooling is very energy efficient.
Aren’t there real instances of metas data centers causing havoc for nearby residents? Light/boise pollution, contaminated water are real things
Maybe they remember all the promises during the 90s fiber glut that cost them billions in taxpayer funds and only resulted in thousands and thousands of miles of fiber still unused (and often even lost and forgotten!) to this day, and don't want a repeat?
Maybe they aren't the braindead zombies you propose and are in fact just regular humans not stupid enough to be utterly sucked into the bubble religion so many AI fanatics are babbling in tongues about?
Maybe they look at things like Flock and palantir and other overt fascism and want to stop the evil. Some people aren't masochist freaks and don't want to be forced to participate in the sick little fetish all the AI sycophants try to abuse them with. Could it be that?
China controls 90-99% of the rare earths - which are necessary for everything from cars to defense, chips, energy and even construction steel;
China controls 70%+ of critical minerals (99% of galium/magnesium, 85% tungsten, etc, etc).
China owns the world’s manufacturing - with the associated skilled tradesmen (hard to produce anything fully locally - the experts are retired / passed already).
China has abundance of power and energy.
China has got both power, energy, and they’ve got the will.
China has got the best intelligence models today (as of this month) - which means scientific superiority, increased productivity, and military superiority.
What does America have, and what does that mean for our economy in the coming 20-40 years?
The reality is that we are in a new race to intelligence and re-industrialization, but we seem to be anti-everything at this point. Nobody wants to hear it, I know I am going to get downvoted to hell with this, but this is ultimately the new reality, and our eternal debating / 4-years cycles vs. life-long strategies in China, is going to cost America everything.
I'm fairly certain the American way of life is exactly what happened here, that citizens of a locality exercise the rights over their land to stop random tech bros from ruling over them with their AI and China mania. I recommend John Quincy Adams 4th of July 1821
You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism?
The United States has always been ruled by elites [1].
The revolution was in large part kicked off because the Proclamation of 1763 rendered the westward land investments of the wealthy worthless [2].
Why would reading 1821 July 4th propaganda be instructive? How about you open up a basic economics textbook and then work your way back to the standard of life you've come to expect and get back to us.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_dynasty 2. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-e...
My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk.
If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want to live in Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon's Borg cube you're in for a few rough decades, on both sides of the political spectrum that is.