Owners of data centres don't have any skin in the game. They are not affected by the negative consequences of the data centres. However, any rise in electricity prices, environmental and noise pollution, and the loss in property value primarily affects local residents, not the owner of the data centre.
All of this has been true ever since people started building large numbers of datacenters back in the 90s, but nobody organized protests about it until "datacenters" became a local proxy for "AI".
There was during the dot com bubble in 2000 and 2001, especially in California, where there also happened to be a power shortage and rolling blackouts.
I'm glad the article calls out early on that the data center issue is largely a proxy for the general hatred of AI. Data centers were generally tolerated until recently. You could make the case that the marginal creep of the internet further into our lives was already hurting us more than helping us, but there was no significant backlash before it started to take the form of slop.
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Owners of data centres don't have any skin in the game. They are not affected by the negative consequences of the data centres. However, any rise in electricity prices, environmental and noise pollution, and the loss in property value primarily affects local residents, not the owner of the data centre.
All of this has been true ever since people started building large numbers of datacenters back in the 90s, but nobody organized protests about it until "datacenters" became a local proxy for "AI".
There was no comparable push to build as many datacenters as quickly and with zero regard to anything else.
There was during the dot com bubble in 2000 and 2001, especially in California, where there also happened to be a power shortage and rolling blackouts.
I'm glad the article calls out early on that the data center issue is largely a proxy for the general hatred of AI. Data centers were generally tolerated until recently. You could make the case that the marginal creep of the internet further into our lives was already hurting us more than helping us, but there was no significant backlash before it started to take the form of slop.