I can attest for the smells better. Now, I'm left wondering which smells worse, an AI datacenter or a large beer brewery. As a kid, we had a Mrs. Baird's bread bakery which was in the heart of town that students would take field trips to see (which is no longer there and is now apartments). On the other side of town is a Budweiser plant, and it's infamous for being so odorific but it is located way the hell out there.
Yeah; an industrial brewery could smell off at times. But the ppl going on about datacenters as though it’s like a pulp mill or iron foundry relocating to your neighborhood are a little much.
I used to work nextdoor to the broadcast headquarters to an old sports cable network and their satellite uplinks. They had several diesel generators on site to ensure power never went down else their entire network went dark. If power was lost, they had batteries for immediate power that lasted long enough for the generators to kick in. When the generators kicked in, it went from being a nice quiet area to being in the parking lot of a truck stop with all of the engines running. If these new datacenters are powering themselves with generators, then yeah, I'd not want them to be around me either.
I think your ire at the discussion is pointed in the wrong direction.
What bakery are you thinking of that pulls the equivalent of a mid sized nuclear power plant? Because you’re off by an order of magnitude I think. (2.2MW maybe)
You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.
I’m in -3’s future backyard, but -1 has been there a while and is kind of the archetype of what a gigawatt facility looks like (the 2.2GW is spread across quite a few AZs, to be fair).