If AI Data Centers Are So Great, Why Are They Being Built in Secret?

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/

To stop assholes from bombing them

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.

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.

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

The conflation of concerns and synechdochal arguments are a wonder to behold.