U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever.

'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'

'Minor source.'

I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.

It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know that go out of their way to use AI, mostly seem interested in building their own AI rigs and running everything locally. I know that's what I do; I almost never use any hosted AI services these days, but I'm using more tokens than ever. The demand for data centers from people who actually like AI even seems to be plummeting.

There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening.

In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.

What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere.

Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.

Many data centers will move north into the Nordic countries where the climate is colder and there is a lot of hydroelectric and wind power. Canada and the Nordic countries will end up building a lot of data centers in remote areas where they are less visible.

At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.

This move to hide the data only reinforces the legitimate public concern.

That is totally going to work, doubling down on something unpopular by un unpopular government has never caused exponentially bigger blowback.

So much democracy and freedom.

It’s funny as Greg Abbott says the data center industry did this to themselves and people’s complaints are justified; the feds say it’s “paid protestors”, the same way they say any protests are inorganic paid leftist agitators. Meanwhile “real” American patriots know data centers make America great, and can’t wait to have one built down the road.

This isn't as bad as it sounds.

The general population is uneducated enough to vote for Trump. Our population was easily infected with anti data center propaganda from China.

Next time you see anti data center propaganda, look at the account. Too often it appears to be an account from India or rural US. I imagine the former are being bought and the later is too uneducated. Data centers are one of The Wests

It doesn't matter, as long as officials are still elected by locals.

This degrowth anti-technology mindset just does not make sense to me, and I think it's mostly astroturfed from TikTok.