“ And ask if AI is so great why hasn’t it designed resource efficient data centers?

And ask what the data centers are actually doing. Bitcoin mining, anyone?”

Says all you need to know about the competency level of this position, which is ideological and not fact-based

It sucks that this how it is but even just the most casual familiarity with all the rules and processes makes it obvious why this is the way it is.

You could find more than enough data points to write this same story about grocery stores or anything else.

1. They're breaking environmental laws in order to meet power demands. xAI has already been busted on this [1], but they keep finding willing accomplices in rural parts of the country to bypass public opposition or speedrun through regulatory exceptions [2].

2. Companies seem to be fudging their numbers when it comes to GPU capacity & current workloads [3], likely to inflate their IPO valuations. I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure but I've not seen any journalist on the other side of the argument provide the volume of data that he has.

[1] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/musks-xai-draws-more-opposit...

[3] https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/

AI is a genuine source of economic growth. I can understand wanting to curtail it, but in return you are getting fewer jobs, less economic growth, more money to other countries who don't allow protesting or even complaining about data centers, etc.

> So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?

Because of this (emphasis mine):

> They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values

How are you supposed to have reasonable discussion about land use, economic impacts, zoning, etc when you're getting flooded with input from crockpots?

Nearly everything in your town is built like this. The amount of people who come out of the woodwork to oppose coffee shops, housing development, new hospitals, bus stops, etc would astound you. Try attending a local city council meeting. Part of the reason civic infrastructure takes so long and costs so much is because of the enormous burdens of transparency.

Or the sheer number of things that can go wrong during zoning, development, etc. The best time to announce a new business is when construction is nearly done. And the cities themselves want the development to be secret because they don't want to be underbid by the town next door (did anybody actually like the transparency of Amazon's HQ2 process?)

They extract local resources (land, power, grid capacity, water, etc) and sell that as compute. As a rule, the mine operators are national or multi-national firms that have no presence with which to invest the extraction profits back into the community. The local resources are harvested, processed, and sold, and then the proceeds disperse into the books of these gargantuan, far-off operators.

The only way to recover some of the profits on those local resources where they're being harvested would be with taxes or similar ongoing development obligations, but the firms specifically predate on communities too politically weak to levy those against them.

If AI isn't just an speculative bubble with gross overinvestment, they may have important value as a national economic or security interest, but they're pretty terrible and lop-sided deal for existing communities. That's why they're kept quiet.

In fact as late as Jan 2026 Google was proudly presenting their new data centers in Bangkok: https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-01-21-Google-Clo...

Disclaimer: Google Cloud employee

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287952