Dorothy

Opposition to data centers has obviously become a big deal in recent years as the largest AI companies build their energy-sucking, water-hoovering monstrosities in communities across the United States. And Americans are frustrated with the lack of transparency that often comes along with having one in your backyard. For example, we recently learned about a data center in Fayetteville, Georgia, that guzzled 30 million gallons of water last year before it started paying a penny for the resources it was consuming.

Americans do not want AI data centers in their backyards According to a new survey, data centers are unpopular with 71 percent of Americans, with water and electricity use a top concern.

AI companies are spending astronomical sums of money on building data centers as quickly as possible in order to increase their compute power. But the majority of Americans don't want that infrastructure close to their homes, according to a Gallup survey.

As data centers have proliferated, the general public has begun to push back against them, citing concerns over pollution, power prices, and water use. When Microsoft brings its own clean power to a project, it can plausibly say it has addressed two of those concerns. Without it, new data centers might be harder to sell to the public.

“Data centers are loud, ugly, and often drive up local electricity bills,” said Chris Lander, vice president of XFRA at SPAN, in correspondence with Ars. “[This] is quiet, discreet, and makes energy more affordable for the host and community.”

The power usage of these gigascale sites and their drastic, high frequency, abrupt load surges from the AI GPU clusters can trigger transient voltage events and frequency instability, risking the entire local grid. The grid itself is not robust enough to support these loads. This leads to the infrastructure gap: The utility is not robust enough and traditional backup sources, such as diesel generators and gas turbines, simply cannot react to millisecond-level power spikes in output. This will often force operators into a cycle of costly infrastructure over sizing just to buffer the volatility.