ChatGPT first became publicly available in November 2022.
Claude.ai launched in July 2023.
According to the United States International Trade Commission as of January 2021 there were about 8,000 data centers worldwide. The United States has around a third of the data centers. The U. S. government has nearly 1,000.
Data are being created very rapidly, much of that is online, and data centers are needed to store it. According to the MMCG, a real estate investment/data research firm, the number of data centers under construction in the U. S. as of June 2026 was roughly 162.
By and large data centers aren’t used specifically for LLM AI; they’re used for data more generally. Modern data centers are used for cloud computing, storage, websites, streaming, enterprise applications, databases, content delivery, AI training and inference, and much else. Worldwide data creation and replication went from 2 zettabytes in 2010 to 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 (a zettabyte is a billion gigabytes).
I can understand NIMBY impulses; there have been concerns about data center construction locally for decades. I cannot understand outright opposition to the construction of data centers and the tone and just plain hysteria of the complaints. Why not five years ago? Why not ten?
None of this is to say that there are no legitimate objections to particular data centers. They consume electricity, require infrastructure, may consume substantial amounts of water, and can impose real costs on the communities in which they are located. Those are reasonable subjects for zoning, regulation, and negotiation.
But they aren’t new.
Neither is the growth in demand for data centers. Long before ChatGPT appeared, Americans were streaming video, moving corporate computing into the cloud, storing photographs and video online, shopping online, operating enormous databases, and generating ever-increasing quantities of data. Data-center capacity was expanding to accommodate those uses.
What is new is the intensity of the opposition.
That raises an obvious question. If the objection is actually to data centers, why didn’t we see comparable opposition five or ten years ago?
One possible answer is simply scale. Today’s projects can be much larger and much more demanding of the electrical grid than their predecessors. That undoubtedly explains some of the increased concern.
But I don’t think it explains all of it. Something else changed at almost exactly the same time: data centers acquired a new public identity. They became “AI data centers.”
And that suggests that at least some of what is being expressed as opposition to data centers isn’t really opposition to data centers at all. It is opposition to AI, Big Tech, and the economic and social changes with which they have become associated.
There is, of course, a simple way to reduce the need for additional data centers: reduce our use of the services that require them.
Stop streaming video. Stop storing photographs and documents in the cloud. Stop using social media. Stop shopping online. Stop using cloud-based business applications. Stop using smart doorbells, smart thermostats, connected automobiles, smartphones, tablets, and PCs connected to the Internet. And, yes, stop using LLM AI.
I don’t expect that to happen.
What we call “the cloud” has a physical existence. It consists of data centers, fiber-optic cables, electrical generating capacity, transmission lines, substations, cooling systems, and all of the other infrastructure required to deliver the online services we increasingly demand.
We cannot simultaneously demand ever more online services and reasonably expect the physical infrastructure supporting those services to stop growing.
That does not mean that every proposed data center should be built wherever its developer wants to put it. Questions about location, water, electricity, noise, taxation, and who pays for necessary infrastructure are perfectly legitimate.
But those are arguments about how and where data centers should be built. They are not arguments that we don’t need them.
Dave Schuler: What is new is the intensity of the opposition.
What’s new is the intensity of the build-out, resulting in local communities and governments being steamrolled. By not accounting for these concerns, it results in overreaction against data-centers.
We do, however, agree with your larger point: expansion of data-centers is essential and inevitable, but there is no reason that reasonable compromises can’t be found. Indeed, data-center expansion can help push older infrastructure toward modernization.
Unless restarting nuclear plants and on-site gas turbines are publicity nonsense, something has changed. Data storage and CPU cycles do not require as much electricity and cooling as GPU cycles, substantially less. If I am correct, cloud storage and computing have been mostly air cooled, but AI computing is mostly water cooling.
(For air cooling, commercial systems either use cooling tower or are a chilled-water system. A cooling tower system uses more water, but I have no idea how much more.)
I believe that part of the problem for NIMBYism is that while corporations want to be treated as persons legally, they do not want to be good members of the community. Being solely responsible to shareholders means stip-mining the local resources and moving to the next location once those are depleted.
I suspect any positive economic impact will be front loaded, but overall, they will be negative. The construction jobs will not be locals, and many (most) of the permanent jobs will go to outsiders or contractors. Except for actual physical work, minimal on-site personnel are required.
These companies have no desire or incentive to improve or maintain the communities they populate. According to Milton Friedman, the corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders not the community in which the data center, factory, manufacturing plant, refinery, etc. resides. Any non-profit generating funds should be considered theft of legally earned profit by the corporation, and thus the shareholders.
So yeah, the same scumbags who sold out their country to Make China Great Again (MCGA) want to Make America Great Again Now That China Is Too Expensive To Exploit (MAGANTCITETE). I would love to see manufacturing return to the US, but these traitorous f*ckers are going to shit in the bed joe six-pack sleeps.
“I can understand NIMBY impulses; there have been concerns about data center construction locally for decades. I cannot understand outright opposition to the construction of data centers and the tone and just plain hysteria of the complaints. Why not five years ago? Why not ten?”
Correct. I continue to think about eminent domain. I live in an area “transitioning.” No GA can continue to be a tourist only, farming area. But actually, no it can’t, and won’t. A humane approach to the 50 – 70 year old home, owned by an 80 year old farmer, presents issues.
“They consume electricity, require infrastructure, may consume substantial amounts of water, and can impose real costs on the communities in which they are located. Those are reasonable subjects for zoning, regulation, and negotiation.”
Yes, true, but this is overblown. Our firm sees transactions every week related to on site electricity production, water recycling and other ancillary services. Data center resource domination is shrinking every day. Its NIMBY.
I think Dave’s comments re: balance of post are all spot on.
” local communities and governments being steamrolled. ”
Arrant nonsense. And spare me the oddball exceptions. Communities are charging RE taxes and financing all sorts of wish list items: schools, fire departments, police, water works, libraries etc. Argue if you like about their necessity. But now you are arguing against your essence. Prefer to increase personal property taxes?
“The construction jobs will not be locals, and many (most) of the permanent jobs will go to outsiders or contractors. Except for actual physical work, minimal on-site personnel are required.”
WTF? OK, I guess its better to have no jobs, RE taxes, infrastructure to support the more robust community. (snicker)
“According to Milton Friedman, the corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders not the community in which the data center, factory, manufacturing plant, refinery, etc. resides”
No, he argued that the two dovetail, and are not mutually exclusive. You just failed your final.
” So yeah, the same scumbags who sold out their country to Make China Great Again (MCGA) want to Make America Great Again Now That China Is Too Expensive To Exploit (MAGANTCITETE). I would love to see manufacturing return to the US, but these traitorous f*ckers are going to shit in the bed joe six-pack sleeps.”
Relax. Take a nap. That was completely incoherent.
First, most local sites are going ahead and building. The issue is getting a lot of play now since its campaign season. Its also an issue because of the rapid growth. The initial centers were built in places where they dont have such large impact with about 97% either in or close to large metropolitan areas. In those sites it’s likely that they provide jobs to people from that area. When the data centers were given tax breaks, which 38 states did, it was a drop in a bucket.
Now they want to expand to rural areas and most places are accepting them. However, some locales had pretty valid reasons to turn them down and other places people got pissed because they were getting no jobs out of it and the data centers were excluded from having to pay local taxes. Plus, there is pretty extensive coverage on the heavy handed approach taken by some of the builders.
All that said I think there is a snowballing effect now and places that should benefit are resisting based on bad information and unfounded fears. I think it calms down after the election. I expect several states to stop offering tax breaks and some might impose some regulations but they will get built.
Steve
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/97-5-of-us-data-centers-are-urban-shattering-rural-myth-study-finds
Z: local communities and governments being steamrolled.
Drew: And spare me the oddball exceptions.
In other words, ignore what is actually happening. Even in the best of times, the amount of money changing hands for development means moneyed interests will bend or corrupt local governments, who often act without significant public input. That doesn’t mean development shouldn’t occur, but it does mean that people often feel they are not in control. And, in fact, the public is often left in the lurch for cleaning up whatever mess is created. With the current data-center expansion, the stakes ($$) are higher, and the rush means “mistakes have been made”.
@Drew
Thank you for schooling me. Nothing to see here. Keep moving along.
I guess the US being hollowed-out is a story MAGA mothers tell their MAGA children to get them to behave while waiting for their $5,000 stimulus check. They get cheap goods from China. So, they should be on their knees every night thanking the shareholders who sold out the country to China.
No, the shareholders aren’t responsible for outsourcing everything not nailed down to China. It was some mysterious entity that snuck in the middle of the night, boxed up the factories, and shipped them to China. Now, the US should pretend like it did not happen.
You should don your MAGA hat, attend a Trump rally, and then, spew Friedman nonsense. Do not be surprised if you get a good beat-down. Trust me. Milton Friedman would not be a fan favorite.
One good thing from Trump’s stupid war is that it has exposed how much the Make China Great Again (MCGA) crowd has actually done to undermine the US’s ability to manufacture its own munitions and armaments.
Having lots of wealth is worthless if you cannot protect it, and because much of that wealth is leveraged assets, a pile of rubble created by an Iranian ICBM causes a lot of wealth destruction. On a positive note, they will have a hard time finding any manufacturing facilities to destroy. So, there’s that.
The wheels are off the bus, and a lot of people on your side are starting to notice. It may take a while for them to connect the dots, but Milton Friedman is just one dot – one big dot.
I just need to kick back and wait.
(Once again, I was a hardcore Randian Objectivist, and while I may have agreed with some of Milton Friedman, I would have considered him a socialist – textbook not political. At the time, I would have considered anarcho-capitalists as socialists.)