Yet another Hacker News

America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments

29 points afandrew 2 hours ago 78 comments

afandrew 2 hours ago | parent

This is Andrew, Founder/CEO of Prophecy Gov (AI agents for city governments). We operate American Sentiment.

Our main focus is building AI tools that serve city staff. We also create data from public, online data sources; in this case city council videos.

Data center development has reached a fever pitch nationwide. We started American Sentiment to help AI leaders, researchers, and the public better understand and respond to local sentiment nationwide.

The American Sentiment on Flock Safety is next!

Analysis: https://x.com/andrewfang/status/2117048211051532555

Findings include:

-73% of meetings had 0 people speaking in favor of data centers.

-Water use was the #1 issue. And only 1 in 5 comments mention AI!

-Elon Musk was mentioned more than Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Kevin O'Leary combined.

-Data center opposition is heavily bipartisan.

Barbing 1 hour ago | parent

https://xxcancel.com/andrewfang/status/2117048211051532555

Helpful charts, thank you!

lnkdinsuxs 53 minutes ago | parent

Is there any information or evidence that the opposition and the people at these meetings clearly understood how they would stand to benefit?

bluefirebrand 34 minutes ago | parent

How would the average person benefit exactly?

How does an AI data center make my life or my family's lives better?

I feel quite strongly that AI is making my life worse right now, so I'm interested to hear how you would convince me that a data center near me would be good for me even as I'm unemployed due to AI.

cowpig 35 minutes ago | parent

Can you help me understand the water issue?

Are data centers being proposed that use a ton of water? If so, why? Liquid cooling on the chip should just be recycled, and there are many ways to dissipate heat without evaporating away a ton of potable water right?

afandrew 29 minutes ago | parent

Water issue was brought up the most, but that doesn't mean it's actually true. I think for most data center development projects, the claims of water use are incredibly exaggerated/false. For American Sentiment we're just aggregating what residents said, rather than judging whether it's accurate or not. If anything it goes to show that the AI labs have down an awful job communicating with the general public; there are real downsides/concerns, but this one should be a lay up for them to clear up, and yet they haven't.

tptacek 1 hour ago | parent

Negative comments on data centers, or power plants, or day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops, or new fire hydrants are exactly what you'd expect from the (demented, sometimes literally) municipal public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally --- people turn out because they're risk-averse and don't want to see change that could impact their own homes, and virtually nobody turns out for the abstract upside of new development --- and also demographically: public comment skews sharply older, wealthier, and towards homeowners.

The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system (all the political systems that support it) and we should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach it. Public comment is one of the first principal components of the American housing shortage.

ryandrake 1 hour ago | parent

What's the alternative? Without public comment, politicians will just do whatever they want without accountability or open opposition. With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability but at least there is a record of opposition.

jrflo 1 hour ago | parent

I’m not sure there is a good alternative, but it is a problem. So many public infrastructure projects in the US are shot down or neutered because of short term issues outweighing long term upsides.

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

Short term how? As in "you'll get used to it"?

jrflo 59 minutes ago | parent

Not talking about data centers specifically here, there’s a few public transit projects near me that got killed/neutered because people didn’t want to live near a construction site, while it would have been beneficial long term.

jacquesm 59 minutes ago | parent

Datacenters are not really public infrastructure though. They are private infrastructure and even though the outcome could well be similar there is no link between the two.

Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.

jrflo 55 minutes ago | parent

Electricity is a utility, but is privately owned in the US. Everyone relies on data centers just as much as electricity in modern life. There are obviously exceptions for mega ones like Elon built in Memphis, but the vast majority are just normal infrastructure

jrmg 54 minutes ago | parent

That the process is sharply biased towards negativity is a cogent criticism.

Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.

It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.

With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability

This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?

dantillberg 54 minutes ago | parent

I think tptacek means to emphasize the "public comment process" as opposed to "public comment" in general. Generic public comments/discussion are great (I think tptacek would agree because... they're commenting publicly).

It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.

The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.

sarchertech 48 minutes ago | parent

No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc… because he believes that negative comments are overrepresented.

Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.

Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.

A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.

fasterik 43 minutes ago | parent

>No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.

sarchertech 37 minutes ago | parent

In a comment a few weeks ago he literally said exactly that.

>local political participation

Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.

We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.

fasterik 33 minutes ago | parent

"Making it easier to participate" is precisely what's at issue here. I don't think that's incompatible with what you were replying to. Note, nobody in this thread said that the public shouldn't have input, just that the existing processes of getting public input are broken.

sarchertech 27 minutes ago | parent

Telling people to ignore it when 100 people show up to your town meeting to say don’t do something because there’s secretly 500 people at home who want you to do that thing but aren’t doing anything to externally to indicate their wishes isn’t what I’m talking about.

I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.

Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.

fasterik 18 minutes ago | parent

You're still responding to points that nobody in this thread made. Can you show me a direct quote where someone said that we should ignore people showing up to town hall meetings, or that we should try to guess what people believe without getting their input?

sarchertech 2 minutes ago | parent

I had a conversation with the OP a while back where he was posting about how people are much more likely to show up to speak against something at a town hall and how he was talking to elected officials about this bias.

I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.

The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.

solyin 16 minutes ago | parent

If only there were some way of communicating remotely. Some sort of inter-network of devices and people could register their values and opinions so they'd have easier opportunities to tell people what they believe.

What would we call such a thing‽

sarchertech 11 minutes ago | parent

You realize that the majority of “public comments” in the US are made by filling out a web form.

jacquesm 46 minutes ago | parent

> It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative.

Then you need to fix that.

akerl_ 38 minutes ago | parent

Which "you" are you talking to here?

If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.

But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.

jacquesm 33 minutes ago | parent

No, I mean that if participation is that low amongst certain demographics that that seems to me to be a problem that can be fixed.

akerl_ 27 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand how you feel so comfortable handwaving the idea of "fixing" the fact that broad chunks of the American population are radically less able to turn up for a couple hours to participate in public comment sessions. There's any number of underlying causes, ranging from having to work multiple jobs or bad hours to having families to take care of or lack of reliable transportation.

jacquesm 17 minutes ago | parent

If we can switch to 'work from home' for a large fraction of the population at the drop of a hat I think with all of these technically savvy people there should be a way to improve on this. If that's not true then what is all this tech good for anyway?

sarchertech 12 minutes ago | parent

In many cases public comment doesn’t require showing up, it requires filling out an online form.

To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.

But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.

“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”

He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.

Forgeties79 1 hour ago | parent

So, what? We just ignore them?

lurk2 1 hour ago | parent

> The public comment process is an anti-democratic pox on our system

This just sounds like your ideas are bad and you’re upset that no one supports them.

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

This is hard to follow.

Some people have opinions that are perfectly human, but that you may certainly disagree strongly with. And yes, some people have straight up crazy opinions. And yes, some people have selfish opinions.

So... your answer is "fuck the people"? What are you even talking about? This is a necessary part of government. You are not the keeper of Correct Opinions. You're suggesting doing the thing that citizens historically get their weapons out to (rightfully) eject from civilization.

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

So, that sounds like a great opportunity to engage the younger, poorer and the homeless then. That will certainly give a lot more perspective, but I doubt the outcome would be very different when it comes to datacenters. With respect to the housing shortage I suspect it would give a completely different outcome.

Also: you can't really blame those who do show up for a democratic process for having the wrong ideas relative to those that don't show up.

Public comment is a feature of the democratic process, I don't see how it could ever be seen as anti-democratic.

bobsomers 57 minutes ago | parent

What a dogshit take. The public comment process is anti-democratic? So the public having less input in the process and letting local officials do whatever they want is somehow more democratic?

cucumber3732842 45 minutes ago | parent

I live adjacent to an industrial area. I showed up in support of a proposed recycling center. I lowkey hope it's loud and stinky because I want the vicinity to be an unappealing place to live because then the people I find unappealing will self select to live elsewhere but I didn't say that. Instead I mocked shortsighted environmentalists and out of touch ivory tower types who want everyone to recycle but also want to impose supply side restrictions on that. If not here than where?

ulfw 45 minutes ago | parent

What a ridiculous comment so typical for HN nowadays.

newobj 41 minutes ago | parent

Ah ninja smoke bomb out w/o proposing any alternative. Handy.

Not to mention hilariously conflating public comment on data centers (massively unpopular) with local weirdo NIMBYism on things like "coffee shops" and "fire hydrants". We all know every city has people that just love to speak at the city council meetings. Can't take it in good faith that you seriously think it's the same thing that's going on with opposition to data centers.

akerl_ 22 minutes ago | parent

How do you know that the people speaking about with NIMBY views are "weirdos" and "people that just love to speak at the city council meetings", but the people speaking about data centers are different?

mplewis 36 minutes ago | parent

We use public comment to _promote_ building housing here in Longmont, CO. Perhaps it's a skill issue.

vatsachak 1 hour ago | parent

I'm pro AI and data center but a lot of construction is short sighted.

They should invest money into improving electric and community infrastructure. There are so many win-wins to be had and they fumbled

lnkdinsuxs 58 minutes ago | parent

> They should invest money into improving electric and community infrastructure

The problem with electric and community infrastructure is that very few electric infrastructure is owned by the community, but that's not the core issue because the other infrastructure that is indeed owned by community has people in the community split on what's useful and what not.

Imagine how difficult it is to decide where to go out to lunch in a group of people. Now up the stakes to getting people to agree on whose backyard and where holes and trenches and dug and electric poles and power stations are put up.

Waterluvian 1 hour ago | parent

If there’s really trillions of dollars of market cap to be had, why not just build in the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario and build your own damn dams and infrastructure?

You’ve got a ton of water. A ton of famously cheap hydro electricity potential. An entire service industry for remote mines (who will build your roads and power). And you’re not being an unwanted bastard.

My sense is that the answer is very simple: because they can just use someone else’s.

akerl_ 1 hour ago | parent

Is there a network backbone running through the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario?

tomrod 1 hour ago | parent

They are running loads of fiber. If it's worth the trillions then it's worth some easement beside a railroad.

akerl_ 57 minutes ago | parent

In the model it sounds like you're suggesting, instead of building a datacenter in the middle of the US along an existing internet backbone (a move which is already drawing tons of public criticism), they could build in rural Canada and also buy up easements to lay an entirely new set of high bandwidth pathways through rural Canada to connect those datacenters to the rest of the world?

jacquesm 54 minutes ago | parent

I'd love for rural Canada (or what is left of it) to stay as pristine as it is today. Sticking a datacenter in there sounds a bit like putting on in the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone (though, Yellowstone might be the better of the two with respect to Geothermal energy).

Waterluvian 51 minutes ago | parent

By and large we aren’t hesitant to take a portion of the remaining 80% of undeveloped Canada and do useful things with it. I can’t speak for all Canadians but that’s just not been a point of contention.

The amount of surveyed untapped hydro potential is something like 110GW. Though to be fair I haven’t studied any of this too deeply since grad school (which I refuse to let my brain appraise how long ago that was.)

akerl_ 46 minutes ago | parent

How broadly have you shopped this idea? Most Americans weren't anti-datacenter-in-my-state until this recent wave of tons of datacenters popping up in their state.

Waterluvian 40 minutes ago | parent

Mark’s a bit busy… but I actually chatted about this with the hockey parents at the rink this morning. They’re anti data center mainly because they just feel the companies (apparently they think it’s all Google and Facebook and have no clue Anthropic or OpenAI is a thing) will ruin the town and cause blackouts and ruin the water pressure (our water pressure is kinda weak). When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?” they went from negative to I’d say indifferent. Except our goalie’s mom who was a hard no under any circumstances.

What I found interesting was that none of them had a single thing to say about the actual AI tech. Mind you n=6 or 7.

jacquesm 34 minutes ago | parent

> They’re anti data center mainly because they just feel the companies (apparently they think it’s all Google and Facebook and have no clue Anthropic or OpenAI is a thing) will ruin the town and cause blackouts and ruin the water pressure (our water pressure is kinda weak).

Whether they know who Anthropic or OpenAI or are familiar with AI tech is immaterial, they are allowed a say on what happens in their immediate environment regardless of the application of the DC. The environmental impact of datacenters is substantial, especially near residential areas.

> When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?”

Timmins? Or somewhere along the 144? That's not going to work: that area is pretty much inaccessible a good chunk of the year, besides you won't find the personnel to man your DCs there. And to hook it up you'll be digging fairly long trenches adding quite a bit to the cost of deployment.

Waterluvian 25 minutes ago | parent

Timmins is 3 hours!

Take a peek at Churchill Falls NL. They’re upgrading it to something like 14,000MW. You can see the hydro corridor on the satellite imagery. It goes for hundreds of KM to get to the customers.

I’m just not convinced that the frontier logistics are a real problem for an industry that’s supposed to be worth trillions.

jacquesm 15 minutes ago | parent

I've been there a couple of times. And I visited a few of the dams (some were under construction when I lived there, others were already operating).

I was just wondering where you had planned this and Timmins is the biggest population center North of Sudbury that I'm aware of.

jacquesm 39 minutes ago | parent

I'd be all for it as reclamation of the territories that have already been damaged pretty much beyond recovery due to the oil industry. But the Canadian North is very precious. Besides, I wouldn't want to give my capricious neighbor yet another reason to 'protect' their investment.

Waterluvian 36 minutes ago | parent

Ahh don’t worry about it. We’ll leave you a crate of Whisky, too.

narmiouh 1 hour ago | parent

Yes

akerl_ 1 hour ago | parent

https://map.kmcd.dev/

Is it somehow not being represented here?

ceejayoz 55 minutes ago | parent

That map shows zero on-land connections, as far as I can see. With the possible exception of Brazil, but that might be a cable down the Amazon from the looks of it.

akerl_ 53 minutes ago | parent

Are we looking at the same map? The light blue dots all across the continent are annotated by peering capacity.

ceejayoz 44 minutes ago | parent

But there's fiber connecting said dots the parent poster is talking about leveraging, right? Your map appears to only include submarine cables; see Australia, for example, where there's a huge on-land connector between Perth and Melbourne/Sydney (https://infraco.telstra.com.au/solutions/intercity-dark-fibr...) not represented.

akerl_ 33 minutes ago | parent

What two dots are you thinking of where the connecting fiber would traverse northern Québec and Ontario? The furthest north there's a major presence seems to be Quebec City, but I don't see another rational endpoint and even that's measured in Gbps. Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second

ceejayoz 29 minutes ago | parent

https://www.bceglobal.net/our-network

> Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second

A problem if you're Netflix. Less so if you're Claude, where giant clusters of RAM and compute generate a few kilobytes of text leaving the datacenter at a time.

akerl_ 25 minutes ago | parent

Your map maps the same point as mine. I also think you're massively underestimating the amount of ingress/egress traffic needed for one of these facilities.

ceejayoz 22 minutes ago | parent

> Your map maps the same point as mine.

But it's the lines between that matter, yeah?

Again, your map would say datacenters in the Australian outback would be insane, but there's huge dark fiber capacity passing through it.

> I also think you're massively underestimating the amount of ingress/egress traffic needed for one of these facilities.

Ingress/egress for AI compute is clearly different than some other use cases. One needs only to watch Claude's network activity for evidence of this.

(Like, it's the least problematic part of the in-space datacenter idea, versus cooling and maintenance.)

akerl_ 15 minutes ago | parent

Sorry, can we just get to the root here? Do you actually think there's a bunch of fiber capacity in the rural north of Ontario and Quebec?

You keep trying to slice and dice the maps to say that there is in fact stuff in Canada. I'm not disputing that Canadians have the internet. I'm debating that it would be possible to put datacenters in northern Ontario and Quebec without doing massive infrastructure projects to run new fiber a significant distance, likely to Quebec City or to the northern US.

If you think that's incorrect, and that there's actually existing fiber that would support this, I would be curious for you to say so directly. Otherwise, the maps seem clear: there's some connectivity in the coastal and southern areas you'd expect, but nothing inland and northern and nothing at the scale of the US midwest.

ceejayoz 2 minutes ago | parent

> likely to Quebec City

But that's... already on the map?

> nothing at the scale of the US midwest

Again, I note the very different ingress/egress requirements of AI compute.

Waterluvian 54 minutes ago | parent

Just pretend there’s an ocean and lay fibre. Bell does it to my lawn already.

redanddead 1 hour ago | parent

There's not infinite hydro... net new energy is coming from increased efficiency (insulation etc) and upgraded turbines

lnkdinsuxs 55 minutes ago | parent

> If there’s really trillions of dollars of market cap to be had, why not just build in the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario and build your own damn dams and infrastructure?

If nothing works out domestically, this might very well be where the industry ends up.

The current attempt is to have domestic (in the continental US) AI - because owning the infrastructure is way more valuable than renting it.

andsoitis 55 minutes ago | parent

Wouldn't that cost more?

ipdashc 46 minutes ago | parent

They are building them in the middle of nowhere. I've looked up sites for data center projects before and it'll literally be in some empty field far away from any homes, and people will still complain as if they're flattening a neighborhood. It's a little ridiculous.

That said, I agree they should put them in Canada and similar regions, it seems like a no brainer resources-wise for the reasons you mentioned. The reason they don't is probably that it's vastly more expensive to work on remote sites like that. Mines and dams do it by necessity, but it's a big undertaking to build stuff a full day's drive (or bush plane flight) from the nearest city.

lnkdinsuxs 1 hour ago | parent

Data centers and power plants to power them are the new oil.

Also, just like oil is dirty, bad for the environment and kills people, so will the data centers. And the power plants to power them.

Our options are not to not have Data centers and their power plants but whether to have them built elsewhere (even outside the US) and pay rent or own them and get paid the rent.

Arguments about having more efficient or green Data centers and power plants miss the point. Engineering is a process of iterative improvement - you don't begin with the perfect product, you begin with one that crashes, burns and breaks some bones.

It's understandable though that no one one wants to be "it".

BatchJob 48 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like people figured out how unsustainable data centers are and that they create no jobs.

That should be enough to stop it. But not in America.

WarmWash 43 minutes ago | parent

By my job their is a large vacant lot where they wanted to build a distribution center with over 125 truck bays. Absolutely gargantuan. Guaranteed trucks coming and going non-stop, lots more traffic, lots more noise, diesel engines idling all day. There is a school and a neighborhood immediately adjacent on one side, and commercial space and a minor highway on the other sides.

Apparently the developer was approached about the possibility of building a DC there, and it set off a five alarm fire of hysteria in the town. Of course, no one even blinked about the warehouse.

So now we are probably gonna get the hundreds of trucks 24/7 instead of the large quietly humming box (that would also probably increase tax revenue by 30%).

add-sub-mul-div 35 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps they believe that the flow of physical goods is a positive thing while the flow of slop is not.

nickstinemates 36 minutes ago | parent

Bring back the $50k house. Thousands of them. Have the data center builders build communities around the data center. Sold to first time home buyers only, with a X year lock-in period. Effectively free energy comes along with it. Prop up community infrastructure so small businesses can proliferate.

Make the AI companies fully subsidize it instead of government.

It would change the sentiment in the country in an instant as affordability wrt owning a home would be in reach.

akerl_ 31 minutes ago | parent

Why would this change the sentiment of the people in the country who are already actively fighting against the price of housing coming down?