Data Centers are a Public Benefit, Let’em be Built on Public Land.

General Discussion
1

I’m a rube who has been trying to explain wherever I can comment t that the local opposition to data centers does NOT (in my experience) come from people who are primarily worried about utility costs and water usage. No it’s because we grew up in, or chose, a rural area, and that’s how we want it to stay. ( Okay, maybe the Chinks are using that kind of sentiment, but that doesn’t mean their meddling is the root of it.)

There exist in my state, Pa, over 4 million acres of public land owned by either the state or the federal government. (Sez the game commission) .

So why hasn’t anybody asked why these behemoths can’t be built on public land?

It is puzzling to me whether this could be done given the power requirements of each plant. In response to my previous post ; “Please Sir, I want SMR! “ You dear polymaths seemed to express a consensus that each one would require a HUGE nuclear plant. And a video someone helpfully posted pointed out that if they use electrical power, there will be condemnations of land to build the huge towers which carry the electric power lines.

But why are they futzing around with local zoning regulations and community opposition when the state or fed govts could just say: put it here, a remote site in the center of a trackless forest?

Oh, yeah, as I’ve written before, this would mean the crashing fall of the paradigm our generation has lived by all our lives, basically: conservation good. But so what! It’s a brave new world now. And as a land-use lawyer, it looks to me like our entire country is relentlessly being subjected to a nationwide Heavy Industry zoning overlay district, to facilitate data centers EVERYWHERE—

EXCEPT, there’s little mention using PUBLIC land!

Why the F not? There is SOOOO much of it, especially out West, but вs I said, even here in Pa, one of the original 13 colonies!

I know Trump has proposed opening federally owned land for this purpose.
As a rural landowner, I’m reduced to the posture “better 6 or so miles away than on MY land”—while my Prog daughter chides me for not helping organize opposition to the second data center being proposed in our small, heretofore rural, township.

I dont know, sometimes this entire phenomenon brings to my mind that universally derided phrase from the Vietnam era: “in order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it.” It was considered a laughable oxymoron then; Now, in connection with data center development in our American “villages”, it seems to many people to be a self-evident truth.

Whaddya think dear polymaths? Instead of a moratorium on data centers in Pa, could Gov. Shapiro have solved the problem by announcing that they could be built in state-owned land?

5 Likes
2

Even better – require that the data centers be built on land bought from the State at premium prices. Revenue to be used by the State for some good public purpose.

4 Likes
3

OpenAI disclosed a PRC-origin influence operation, nicknamed “Data Center Bandwagon,” that generated posts blaming AI data centers for skyrocketing electricity bills and described the operators as "testing narratives against AI infrastructure.

@amuse on X: "DATA CENTERS: There are more than 5,000 data centers hiding in plain sight. I built dangerous facilities in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, and Miami - they are still running, and you never knew. https://t.co/zEbzdwMQBQ" / X

3 Likes
4

OK, great! If they CAN be built so unobtrusively, they why didn’t they go on doing that, why do they have to clear-cut 500+ acres of agricultural or forest land?

I ws so disappointed in Greg Gutfeld last night. His whole first block was about data centers and how the PinkChinks are just using us rubes to impede our country’s progress. I mean, a nod to the feelings of rural Americans, an acknowledgment that they’re paving Paradise, woulda been considerate,
We have SO many abandoned industrial sites in this country. If data centers could be built in those rusting graveyards, that would solve the whole problem! Somebody did mention the steel mills sites recently. But that’s so obvious, it HAS to have occurred to the constructors already, and been rejected for some reason.

For that matter (and I’m really not sure how this happened) in my area we now have truck terminals, distribution centers, which seem to have sprung up overnight: huge long low white buildings with rows and rows of truck bays, feeding the voracious appetite for online shopping. If data centers can really be as unobtrusive and compact as this article says, why not let ‘em co-occupy those sites?

I’m totally frustrated by the question of how big these things , and their power sources, HAVE to be.

3 Likes
5

I support data centers in cities such as Los Angeles

Will never happen but I can dream

1 Like
6

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backlash-bots

1 Like
7

Love that Axios piece, @eggspurt! “it’s about touching grass and actually being somewhere”…YES! YES! YES! I would appreciate just a leeeetle more recognition of the way rural America, we rubes, rednecks, denizens of The Sticks, see this issue.

F’rinstance, I think I mentioned Gutfeld’s take on it a few nights ago.Now, I recognize that Gutfeld’s schtick, like the great Johnny Carson before him, is to make all of his audience feel like sophisticated urbanites for a few minutes before they go to sleep. We snuggle up close to the beating heart of metropolitan America, the bright lights of the Big City.

It’s just rubbing salt into the wound when people whose first thought about a proposed data center was “WHAT? theyre gonna clear-cut and pave Broad Mountain?!?” are told that their angst is not really their own, it’s been implanted by PinkChink mind control.

And @Citizen_bitcoin : yeah! If these centers are really so innocuous, why CANT they be put in areas already urbanized? There are so many vacant sites in many of our cities and in areas formerly zoned for industry. There has to be a reason why nobody proposes that.

4 Likes
8

Probably bureaucracy. Those former industrial sites may have “dangerous” chemicals buried there, requiring at least a decade of expensive monitoring and even more expensive legal maneuvering before anything could be built. Not to mention the injunctions sought by the local Historical Preservation Society.

2 Likes
9

Cities used to provide enormous economic advantages to pretty much all business endeavors. Transportation, Communications, Infrastructure, and Human Resources are all cheaper when geographically concentrated, all else being equal.

But “all else” doesn’t stay equal, as a city’s concentration of wealth becomes a difficult-to-escape target for parasites and politicians (but I repeat myself).

America’s fabulous road networks, now combined with ubiquitous broadband, have broken the city’s comparative advantage on transportation and communication. Escaping the parasites easily justifies tolerance of rural infrastructure, and staffing for Data Centers is relatively low.

Placing a Data Center in a modern city is stupid, and these companies are not stupid.

Edit: Oh, yeah, can’t forget energy. Energy is cheapest when generation and consumption are close to each other. Which used to be true in cities, but politicians drove generators out, and are driving them further away, and are mandating absurdly expensive, bogus technologies.

3 Likes
10

They used to do this in the past. See several examples in Data Centers are a Public Benefit, Let’em be Built on Public Land. - #3 by eggspurt

11

Western politicians – but we have an entire Congress demonstrating that politicians are not selected for their intelligence.

The old Soviet politicians used to put power stations in the center of town. Then the rejected heat from the thermodynamic generation process (ie hot water) was circulated through buildings in the city center to provide very low cost warming during the winter months, and domestic hot water year round. Of course, Soviet politicians, despite all their many other failings, did recognize that the Laws of Physics take precedence over any little laws they could pass.

3 Likes
12

Oh, man, and did the Soviets have hot water! At the Intourist Hotel in Moscow, it came outta the shower head like Mt Vesuvius, unfortunately often disengaging the shower head to engage forcibly with yours….thanks for the memories!

2 Likes
13

Yes, memories! I have very fond memories of my apartment in Almaty, Kazakhstan. It was a modern building in the middle of town, only about 2 or 3 stone-throws from the gas-fired power station – which was remarkably unobtrusive. No noticeable noise, smoke, or smell. But the endless nearly-free hot water after wading through snow-piled sidewalks – almost heaven!

2 Likes
14

RE: Data Centers.
Someone said that they will be short lived. Probably when a new level of technology makes them obsolete.
But wait ! I stumbled upon this and it makes sense…

in the near future
in the near future682×800 97.1 KB

4 Likes
15

I believe data centers are innocuous and I hope they become my neighors

The choice is date centers or wet backs

1 Like
16

I have a large one near by (~6 miles):

Not quite completely built out, but the controversial new power lines are done. (1.2 GW capacity)

3 Likes
17

The usual suspects are trying to tar the (R) gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity with the original sin of support for data centers in PA. Practicing the rules for radicals, as usual. Offer no ideas, debate no substantive issues. Just instill hatred for those with whom you disagree. The fact such tactics still have any traction is a sad commentary on the quality of the electorate. Yup, these are the same people who call for more taxation of corporations. They just can’t understand who it is that pays these taxes which are merely collected by said corporations - passed through to their customers. We have the government we deserve, soon to collapse, completely.

2 Likes
18

As Trotsky might have said to our Betters – You may not be interested in reality, but reality is interested in you.

1 Like
19
20

An interesting take on who is going to end up paying for AI data centers – it seems the answer is “us”. If they end up being profitable, the winnings will go to someone else. If – as seems possible – over-investment leads to bankruptcies …

The full article requires a free sign-up:

Sign Up - The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson

"… These assets need to be financed. Some of the capital comes from the cash flows, equity, and debt of the companies themselves, but a large chunk is going into special purpose vehicles (SPVs): opaque investments packaged by Wall Street that regulators struggle to value and are sold to pension funds, private investors, and insurance companies. …

A recent paper by Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato, “Private Credit’s State Backstop,” describes how private equity firms have bought up life insurers and stuffed their balance sheets with opaque private credit. When one of these insurers fails, it does not go through bankruptcy. Other insurers are assessed to cover the shortfall, and in most states they recover the cost through tax credits. Roughly 86% of the bill quietly lands on taxpayers. …"

2 Likes