[throwway120385]

I think it's really easy to blame one or another specific group for the "market failure" but the reality is that if there were 100B worth of capital looking for 1T worth of gross over 10 years there would be a lot of places that would welcome that kind of spending. I think it's probable that in specific places there's been push back, and those places are probably where the work was historically concentrated. But if that's the case, you should really be asking "why is there push back now when there wasn't before?" And I don't think the answer is because the entire community has adopted a "degrowth" agenda. Rather, I think it's going to be more about chemical dumping in the water supply or use of scarce resources that the community would rather not spend for the profit of a few people who don't live there.

I think a lot of people will accept industry when industry tries to be a good steward of the community's environment.

[jandrewrogers]

It is happening to production facilities across the US. Both new production facilities and expansion of existing facilities. The locale doesn't seem to make a difference.

As with the sudden inexplicable "concern" about data center construction, I don't think this activism is organic.

[dec0dedab0de]

As with the sudden inexplicable "concern" about data center construction, I don't think this activism is organic.

I don't think it is sudden, there was much of the same concern about Amazon warehouses and anything else that cuts down trees, disrupting wildlife, and human neighbors. The reason it is more of a concern with modern datacenters is because they don't come with a significant amount of new jobs for the communities they are affecting. People will put up with a lot if means their unemployed loved ones can get on their feet.

With AI being a looming threat to everyone's livelihood it is compounding the reaction, not only do these datacenters not provide new jobs, they are actively contributing to people losing their current jobs.

If these new datacenters were going into empty buildings in cities that already had adequate infrastructure, then no one would care. They would still be against ai in general, but the datacenters wouldn't be a problem.

edit:

They could probably get a ton of support if they went into one of the many cities with crumbling infrastructure, took over abandoned buildings, and paid to fix up the roads and stuff. Like if they moved into an abandoned factory in flint, and fixed the water supply they could be heros.

[overfeed]

You find populism in the US inexplicable in 2026? Where have you been for the past 18 years? You get instant political capital by framing anything as elites vs the common man, and the tech company billionaires cannot escape that "coastal elite" label, or hide that they want to build more data centers.