alt Hacker NewsOn the contrary, companies building things is *constantly* under scrutiny for local building plans. That’s literally what the NIMBY / YIMBY movements are all about - using political clout and power (especially including voting) to affect what can and cannot be built.
That's not quite correct. There's a lot of NIMBY pressure in cities, where land is scarce and there's lots of people to attend planning meetings to block building.
However, if you want to build a datacenter, you don't need to build it in downtown Manhattan. You can build it anywhere, and some places make it easy to build data centers.
By definition local restrictions apply locally. If you want more housing in Manhattan then Manhattan nimbyism really matters. But if you want to build a data center somewhere you have a lot of options. There's no nationwide vote on allowing datacenter construction.