U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

vintagedave

> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever. 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.' 'Minor source.' I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.

feverzsj

It doesn't matter, as long as officials are still elected by locals.

flanked-evergl

This degrowth anti-technology mindset just does not make sense to me, and I think it's mostly astroturfed from TikTok.

ModernMech

It’s funny as Greg Abbott says the data center industry did this to themselves and people’s complaints are justified; the feds say it’s “paid protestors”, the same way they say any protests are inorganic paid leftist agitators. Meanwhile “real” American patriots know data centers make America great, and can’t wait to have one built down the road.

cmiles8

There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening. In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.

oefrha

What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere. Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.

Zambyte

It seems like there will be a collapse in building data centers, to the point that a large amount of the newly built ones will be reclaimed for other things. There is a very large group of people who are against building new data centers because they hate AI (and any pollution related arguments these people make are in support of their primary concern, being AI). But on the flip side of that, even people that I know that go out of their way to use AI, mostly seem interested in building their own AI rigs and running everything locally. I know that's what I do; I almost never use any hosted AI services these days, but I'm using more tokens than ever. The demand for data centers from people who actually like AI even seems to be plummeting.

globemaster99

So much democracy and freedom.

m4rtink

That is totally going to work, doubling down on something unpopular by un unpopular government has never caused exponentially bigger blowback.

NishanStepak

Many data centers will move north into the Nordic countries where the climate is colder and there is a lot of hydroelectric and wind power. Canada and the Nordic countries will end up building a lot of data centers in remote areas where they are less visible. At the same time, the more the US government acts to support data centers, the greater the reaction will be against them. It is the classic situation where the more the government does, the less people will like it.

jqpabc123

This move to hide the data only reinforces the legitimate public concern.

randusername

How naive I was to hope that the strain data centers will place on the electric grid would spur very big, very public investment in renewable energy and nuclear. Somebody has to realize that gas turbines are backordered to the 2030s meanwhile the ROI on solar is getting impossible to ignore.

1vuio0pswjnm7

Original E.P.A. Moves to Curb Public Input on Data Centers https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/climate/epa-data-centers-...

kwhitlock

Data center pushback is inevitable when entire neighborhoods feel the heat and noise.

ETH_start

Hamstringing the build out of AI compute facilities in the United States is strategic suicide. AI compute is a major emerging export industry and the United States is very well positioned to dominate it, unlike mass manufacturing. If it cannot take advantage of its unique strength in AI compute, then it is going to lose the global economic race. AI compute is the first major expansion of physical capital in the United States since the post-war era. Decades of outsourcing and downsizing are finally reversing and helping spur a constellation of supporting industries, like gas turbine manufacturing, a scaling up of energy production and upgrades in the telecommunication infrastructure, in building out high-capacity data links.

smitty1e

The political thing to do here is run for office on a "Data Centers are teh Devil" platform; harness the angst; win; and then do the opposite and approve them all. Teach the peasantry the value of their benighted opinions.