[panny]

>a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments

Wouldn't it be best if the data centers were just... good neighbors? Like everyone talking about illegal bribes and impossible moonshots when the answer is just don't suck?

[fhdkweig]

We are well past the point of these companies caring about their reputations. People are already losing their homes over this. Here is Penguinz0's commentary on a news report of GA Power eminent domaining someone's home to run a power line through it to power a data center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySJ-oVGtvs

[AnthonyMouse]

The general problem is that we've made construction suck for a while now and people are suddenly paying attention to it but only in the case of data centers.

You don't get caught paying bribes if government officials aren't accepting bribes. The problem is the governments have been operating in a mode where blocking everything is the default and paying bribes is the expected way for things to get approved.

[lightbritefight]

The issue with this is that datacenters are inherent "suck" machines. It takes a lot more effort and cost for them to not suck then for them to suck, so "sucking" is part of their core design.

Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore.

There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.