[mindslight]

I'd say the underlying problem here is the general lack of accountability. We have a breakdown in the social contract of the idea that there is any kind of justice to be had by the common person. This manifests in concerns both about the physical data center themselves - high pitched whine from cooling fans that everybody seems powerless to stop, and natural gas power plants snuck in under the auspices of being "temporary" - and also concerns about the displacement of humans by "AI", for which there is also zero belief that there could be political will to stop it against the wishes of the corporate class.

I'm sitting about 10 feet away from my own rack, and yet I'm happy that my municipality just passed a datacenter moratorium. Why? Because once these things are built, there appears to be nothing the community can do to force them to fix problems (on pain of shutdown) or otherwise regulate them once their externalities become apparent. So the only rational thing to do is to say no from the outset.

[steego]

You’re right. The problem is most local governments do not know how to enforce accountability when working with organizations that want to build data centers.

If your local government doesn’t already employ competent people that can properly regulate and oversee the infrastructure impact of a data center, they will be overwhelmed by experts who know how to steamroll them. Passing a moratorium is the right thing for that community to do because it’s clear their local government isn’t up to the task of keeping a giant corporation (that employs armies of experts) accountable.

It is safer to say no from the outset.

[mindslight]

I'd say that's half the problem. The other half is the regulatory environment causes the risk to land completely on the municipality (ie the community). If a datacenter gets approved, and then turns out to have something like subjectively objectionable noise, the datacenter will point to the approval containing no restrictions on noise, or engineering figures showing that it technically meets some requirements. At which point the municipality will basically be prevented from creating new regulation to prohibit the offending behavior. It's like if the kid next door got a loud car stereo, so you worked to get the city to pass a noise ordinance. But then you were told that your neighbor specifically could continue blasting his music since he bought the stereo system before the ordinance was passed.

And that's before getting into federal nonsense where if a community does successfully reign in a datacenter, there is a chance the operator could appeal to the federal regime to override the local laws (as we're hearing about with the on-site natural gas power plants and whatnot). It's best to just not allow any kind of foothold in the first place.