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by IncreasePosts 31 days ago
No human wants data centers but lots of humans want to use services provided by data centers.
3 comments

Also, towns can craft datacenter deals that produce public benefits. It’s expensive fixed infrastructure within their taxing jurisdiction.
The intersection of users and neighbors of AI data centers is probably much smaller than you think.
I can imagine a situation where this is true, like if it was used by some company to train an internal model or a model that never got released.

But even assuming the data center was only used for AI model training, more or less everyone who uses any electronics now either uses generative AI directly themselves or uses services whose employees use generative AI at work to create those services. AI is extremely popular and widespread now among many large and diverse groups of people.

Per polls, ai is pretty hated. And the distaste is growing with growing use.

A lot of ai usage is forced and unwanted. People dont perceive it as source of greatness, but as source of slop, cheap low quality and enshittification and crutially, existential threat.

Sure, people might not like AI by some narrow definition or choose not to use it themselves. But roughly every single service they consume or interact with is downstream of AI at some level now. The demand isn't just for chatbot usage and hasn't been for a long time.
That does not make ai "extremely popular". Instead, it is source of anger. That is what I called "forced to use AI".
The boom in datacenter construction is driven mostly by the AI boom and most of us are sick everything AI too. We don't want to read AI slop, watch AI videos, talk AI customer service or visit a vibe coded website.
Don’t forget getting targeted for scams by slopbots on forums and chat platforms