alt Hacker NewsI think there's room for win-win solutions here; the cost of placating the locals is a rounding error compared to the cost of these data centers.
1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount.
2. Construct a public swimming complex nearby, heated with waste data center heat.
3. Local governments can enforce strict limits on environmental noise at the property boundary. I've personally stood right next to a 150MW-class datacenter and experienced sound levels less than traffic from a typical suburban 4-lane street; making the datacenter quieter than any other industrial use is a choice the builder can make if they have the right incentives.
Setup directional microphones around the perimeter, and fine them $25,000 per minute per dB above the agreed threshold. Distribute the fines to the neighbors. Failure to pay promptly means the sheriff shuts down the power.
All of these options are far cheaper than launching the data center into space...
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All of these options require “extra” money to be spent, which even if it logically makes sense, will not happen when it’s shown companies can buy local politicians and continue anyway
Politics in the US reliably fail to arrive at reasonable conclusions like this. I don't know why.
With low pitched data center noise does the decibel level tell the whole story? I thought it carried better and penetrated better than the db level would indicate.
The engineer style snap to solution with no interest in the actual reasons many Americans are opposed to AI is one of the reasons Americans are opposed to AI
None of these mitigations (although they’re good ideas) address what I think is the real issue here, which is that people don’t like AI. And why would they, when the dish being served by AI CEOs is job loss with a side of extinction risk.
I think many data centre opponents understand that being opposed to AI is not sufficient to halt a local project, so it is noise, water use and power consumption that they latch onto - although, in jurisdictions without plentiful water and clean power, those two reasons are quite valid.
In my own local community, there’s vocal opposition to a proposed data centre that is next to Lake Ontario, 500 metres from the nearest residential neighbourhood, on a brownfield site with 500 megawatts of clean power capacity. None of that makes a difference to those opposed.