I used to live in a place where there are a lot of data centers now. There were only a few just a few years ago. Now there are tens and more under construction.
I returned to that place to visit family and friends last year. It was an eye opening experience. The people who live there have taken a keen interest on curtailing further development of any new data centers. One of the chief complaints is the constant power issues that didn’t exist before 2021-2022.
The locals argue that this is the result of the dramatic infusion of AI into every technology product. They’re likely not wrong. The communities in the area became quite politically active over the issue and have retained all manner of analysts and scientists, journalists and investigators, and so on, to aide them in making a political case against future data center development.
The thing that got me was the complaints about the noise. Over the past few years the locals and those in their employ have been monitoring noise levels near the data centers and they’ve tracked sustained increases in noise pollution with the timeline over which the use of AI has exploded. There it has become sort of a trope to measure the working day by how much noise pollution is produced by any data center nearby. Mostly belonging to a hyperscaler known by an acronym.
The data centers have reportedly not been the boon that was promised, which seems to be seen as insult to injury. The area already has a vibrant tech scene independent of data center operations. So the locals don’t really see value in allowing more data centers to be built, and they’re starting to organize politically around the idea of preventing future data center construction and implementing heavy usage based taxation on utilities used by the existing ones.
I returned to that place to visit family and friends last year. It was an eye opening experience. The people who live there have taken a keen interest on curtailing further development of any new data centers. One of the chief complaints is the constant power issues that didn’t exist before 2021-2022.
The locals argue that this is the result of the dramatic infusion of AI into every technology product. They’re likely not wrong. The communities in the area became quite politically active over the issue and have retained all manner of analysts and scientists, journalists and investigators, and so on, to aide them in making a political case against future data center development.
The thing that got me was the complaints about the noise. Over the past few years the locals and those in their employ have been monitoring noise levels near the data centers and they’ve tracked sustained increases in noise pollution with the timeline over which the use of AI has exploded. There it has become sort of a trope to measure the working day by how much noise pollution is produced by any data center nearby. Mostly belonging to a hyperscaler known by an acronym.
The data centers have reportedly not been the boon that was promised, which seems to be seen as insult to injury. The area already has a vibrant tech scene independent of data center operations. So the locals don’t really see value in allowing more data centers to be built, and they’re starting to organize politically around the idea of preventing future data center construction and implementing heavy usage based taxation on utilities used by the existing ones.