Crossed Wires: The data centres are not the problem — it’s the tenants

Résumé détaillé

Data-centre backlash is spreading across the US, yet local bans are unlikely to halt AI’s expansion or curb Big Tech’s growing ...

Data-centre backlash is spreading across the US, yet local bans are unlikely to halt AI’s expansion or curb Big Tech’s growing power.

Forty out of 41 local ballot measures that sought to ban or constrain data-centre development were approved in the recent US midterm elections, according to Ballotpedia.

That’s a resounding verdict, but there is something that has been niggling at me about the data-centre resistance movement, which also played a role on the political side of the elections.

Before the advent of consumer AI (let’s call it 2023, a few months after the release of the first ChatGPT), there were more than 5,000 data centres in the world, and nearly 1,000 of those were “hyperscale”. Big, sprawling, energy-sucking industrial behemoths, owned by Amazon and Google and Microsoft and a swathe of lesser-known companies.

No one objected. If there were grumbles, they were rare, muted and definitely not front-page material. Data centres had been built for decades; they had been part of the background fabric of the internet since the beginning.

Just about everyone I know holds the same uniform view about data centres – they hate them, want them to just bug off. But when confronted with the question of why they never raised an objection to the many hyperscalers before AI, the certainty sputters. Water? Electricity usage? Noise? Land? They were all there in 2023 (they were even uglier back then – new water-cooling solutions and “bring-your-own-power” have significantly lowered the environmental impact).

There is an interesting and slightly disturbing video online. An even-tempered and earnest young man from SpaceXAI (now SpaceXSI) is gamely trying to present a case for a proposed data-centre project at a community meeting in Cochise, Arizona.

He is trying to explain the economic advantages that the proposed data centre would bring – including electricity bill reductions of up to 40%, lower property taxes, thousands of construction jobs and minimal industrial water consumption.

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