On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.
Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect.
This was never in dispute.
But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption.
Which is middle of nowhere America.
they just want data centers now. most companies would rather use solar, but they can't on short timelines due to land use regulations (and import tariffs)
If they can be deployed in low-earth orbit with nobody working on them, they can be deployed 20 miles east of Bumfuck, Nebraska with nobody working on them.
The point is that if you don't put them in the middle of somebody's neighborhood, nobody will care to attack them.
The idea of building robust, lightly-staffed technical facilities in obscure places all over the country is nothing even remotely new. It's how the long-distance telephone network was constructed and successfully operated in the decades before satellites took over: https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-...
But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.