Why We've Filed a Referendum (opens in new tab)

Watch these

https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?si=4XpIb0vb8YjY1g_k

https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=EB8zAF0JYHvOB23a

https://youtu.be/3VJT2JeDCyw?si=ak7haiWzbX9O8BL9

Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those.

Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.

I think it's as simple as people generally believe that electricity is good for the world, and AI is bad for it. In the former case you're kindof taking-one-for-the-team. Even places that have nasty nasty stuff like tailings ponds generally have a kind of civic pride that coal mining or whatever was a necessity and the sacrifice of their local environment made a lot of other people's comfy lives possible. Data-centers are just not going to inspire that sentiment lol.

> That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.

Wouldn't the question be more simply, Do you want your power bills to go up for the same power used?

And the nuclear accidents that have happend have mostly been overblown (apart from Chernobyl).

I don’t know the background to this project, but a nuclear project would likely be very transparent - with public studies on the impacts and meetings for the public to make their views known. It’s far quicker to build a datacenter than to increase local grid and water capacity later.

> The Stratos Project moved forward with far too many unanswered questions around water, power, cost, and transparency.

In a town near me a paper plant recently closed (to much anger), then people protested the potential use of the land for a data center, citing concerns about noise, water use, power use, and traffic.

Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.

That alone is enough of an argument against them.

It’s pretty simple. People think that AI will take their jobs and maybe murder them, probably because the people developing AI have said it’s going to take their jobs and maybe murder them.

Opposing data centers is the biggest lever most people have to impede AI development.

It makes more sense when you look at how much waste heat it will generate and how it will get its energy [1].

[1] https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

They're big, use up a lot of power, destroy a large batch of land, produce noise and locals get basically nothing out of that (it's not like they provide a lot of jobs or anything). The power bills also go up.

As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.

Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.

Aside from "moral outrage" style concerns ("AI is bad for the environment", power consumption, water consumption, or "datacenters benefit rich people, rich people bad, so datacenters bad"), I've heard of specific bad examples how datacenters (allegedly) negatively impacted the surrounding population:

- Noise (from fans to generators to possible infrasound concerns)

- Air pollution (from data centers semi-permanently running on generators)

- Electricity prices (although I don't understand how this is supposed to work)

- Water consumption affecting the population (water restrictions, price increases, water table dropping)

Many of these are one-sided stories told from the perspective of the residents that I didn't try to verify, but I suspect some of these concerns are legit.

The company building the datacenter has a lot of incentives to cut corners and/or cause some of these impacts, externalizing its costs (e.g. by saving money at the expense of noise emissions, running the DC on unpermitted gas turbines to be able to build a DC where there isn't enough grid, negotiating clever deals that benefit the company but screw over the utility forcing it to raise prices for others, using groundwater for evaporative cooling to make cooling cheaper, etc.)

The company building the datacenter also likely has a lot more experience while the people of the town and the town itself are doing this once, so there is an inbalance in experience that makes it easy for the company to get away with some of these.

There is very little benefit that the people of the area can expect from a data center - as I understand it, there are very few jobs in one past the construction phase, even the construction jobs are often filled with experienced travelling workers, and given the negotiation imbalance, a town seems likely to get screwed on any contributions that the data center promises.

Maybe the solution would be some kind of framework/organization that guarantees (ideally with binding, well tested contracts) that the datacenter won't be a nuisance, builds a reputation for being reliable, and in exchange, companies that work under that framework can expect quick approvals and less pushback.

Until that exists, or companies start offering guarantees up front (e.g. guaranteeing a certain power price or noise level), I'm not surprised that people push back (especially if the company building the data center has screwed up in the past).

> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.

Data centers come with gas-fired plants that pollute the air and reduce your life span. It’s quite rational to not want to live next to one of these: https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-...

The resource consumption is huge and it provides relatively little to the surrounding community compared to its intake. For most residents who live near one it’s a net loss. Qualify of life decreases and utility bills go up so that a Silicon Valley exec can get a nice bonus for closing the deal.

A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.

> I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.

Yay people have finally become rational about nuclear power safety !!!

...right, right?

You’re saying it as if living near a nuclear power plant is bad or something

Utah is such a special, creepy little standout enclave among the states. I've worked with a few Mormon coworkers who are genuinely wonderful people whom I adore, but they are, as a group, militant in a way that's hard to describe.

Indeed, there are no data centers in Democrat run states so it's definitely that

(/s in case it's not obvious)