I love how this is immediately used as an excuse to reinflate the AI bubble. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are just begging for backlash.

Tech companies are mired in debt. They need interest rates to go down.

Higher unemployment makes it harder to raise interest rates.

I think it can't be categorized as NIMBYism because the underlying sentiment is not just no data centers in my backyard, but anyones backyard. It's about the AI project itself, even if it expresses itself differently for a local context.

I’m fine with datacenters being built as long as we have some rules: they have to be quiet enough to not be audible beyond the border of the land owned by the datacenter. They have to pay for new electrical capacity so that they don’t burden locals with that externality. Really, that’s it. I think most people could get behind that.

Theres always going to be some negative externality effecting people that live near anything getting built. Even if the operational data center isn't loud enough to be heard beyond its property lines, the construction process will be louder. I'll also negatively effect peoples views and cause generally increased activity in the area.

But that all seems fine as long as not egregious. But for anything to get built, housing or data centers or what not, we have to accept that those right next to any building project will experience some negative externalities.

Does anyone have any numbers on what percentage of recent datacenters don't follow those rules? Those are completely reasonable requirements. But, the high-pitched online discussion tends to imply building a datacenter requires doing everything the worst possible way every time.

I know there are problematic data centers. I just want to know what the stats are vs. the rhetoric.

I don't have all the numbers but as someone who lives in VA and has had their power bill _double_ over the last year, I'd be hard-pressed to think DCs are commonly paying their fair share when tariffs like this need to be passed: https://virginiamercury.com/2026/08/05/scc-orders-dominion-t...

No. If they still draw an enormous amount of water, that's the finite resource that's getting wasted no amount of money could immediately retrieve. Paying for electricity doesn't mean the resources are not shared.

They also cover acres of ground with impermeable surface so if they are in an area where rain runoff is an issue they should have to mitigate that also. Maybe they could collect the water to use for their cooling needs.

That isn't how water cooling works.

NIMBY may be the incorrect term, but objecting to building something that raises your electricity bill extends how far your “back yard” goes. Objecting because it raises your ram prices extends that to a global scale.

I feel like that is besides the point. I think the fact that ended up this way is an illustration how hardened the public has become. There's no niceties, procedure. The public has been pushed well past that point. This is not a negotiation.

This is more a harbinger of what is about to happen all over the country. So the specifics matter less than it marking the political ascendancy of the backlash to AI / data centers / big tech / billionaires...

Eminent domain is like the the Thanos snap version of state power in a democratic / capitalist country. The ultimate representation of the peoples will over the individuals desire.

Eminent domain is almost always used to make corporations richer. In other parts of the country, eminent domain is being used to seize people's homes to build AI DCs.

Corporations are the money engines of the government.

I don't know of any other way the government makes money other than riding on the back of corporations.

So yes, from the governments POV, using eminent domain to make corporations richer also has the direct effect of making the government richer.

Just think about it a little bit.

Over 80% of the federal government's revenue comes from individuals (income tax, payroll tax).

On the other hand, I guess the vast majority of politician incomes come from corporations.

And where does that income tax/payroll tax money come from?

~45% of people work for companies of less than 500 people, ~12% for the govrnment (federal, state, local), ~6% are self employed. That leaves less than a half for all the companies >500, and only a tiny minority of them have an outsized influence on politics.

EDIT: Also, if there were no big corporations, people would still work and pay taxes. No sane statesman would purposefully build their countries economy on non-state-controlled megacorps.

No, this is more like checks and balances: the state, the public, and corporations are kept in check when two of them join together to oppose the third.

It's kind of strange how the state ("of, by, and for the people") and corporations (comprised of people) are such distinct entities with their own interests. The fact that the state and corporations can and do collude in opposition to the public good is at the heart of so many enormous problems.

It feels like this is the first time I've seen the political system move in tune with the public mood in regards to AI and this is public anger finding expression in public policy.

Backlash is just a natural consequence in a democratic society to the absolute accelerationist mindset that AI development has taken since 2022. Actions meet consequences. I mean it wasn't so long ago they were talking about wiping out all white collar work and consigning most the country to the permanent underclass. If you look at how the rest of the economy has been starved of capital to fund all this and how its contributed to inflation and job insecurity, it doesn't really take a foreign actor to spark a massive backlash.

I feel like if they just expanded this logic slightly they would realize that data centers as an investment class are uninvestable.

Could expand? I don't see the connection with the link.

For example, Google ridiculously overpaid for SpaceX AI data center capacity, by something like more than an order of magnitude, both directly and via Anthropic.

An inquisitively suspicious, not to say cynical, person might believe this was manipulation to keep SPCX from cratering completely before their lock ups expire.

Historically AWS and the like have done rather well with data centers and they are printing money just now.

that's why you also make chips... space access... robotics... energy solutions... etc.

It's largely the same. And it's Jensen circular deals that providing the cash in the first place.

It means it is very fragile. Now if you consider that this probably Nvidia's money doing a circuit, it looks even more dicey.

Or look at it this way, a massive change has been forced on the public through the decisions of a small number of people. Basically the whole "Accept your fate, it is inevitable" backfired spectacularly. The people were robbed of their agency, their democratic process. This is just the democratic will reasserting its agency.

The modern version of democratic will is a sudden need to ban everything because you saw some outrage articles on social media.

I think that ignores the scale and speed of what is happening with the buildout. That it's gotten to the point that states are putting in moratoriums, thats pretty incredible. I've never seen political government forces mobilize this quickly except in some sort of emergency situation.