Are there any confirmed negative impacts of data centers?

Local politicians are all on board with it without requiring the companies to pay higher rates for water/power which they pass along to all the residents. Very few jobs are created and they use massive amounts of land.

I've seen where people are claiming that they are causing cows to give birth to stillborn calves around them. I'm not buying it.

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It's a Chinese psy op, pretty clear at this point.

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Yep. They have left wingnuts and right wingnuts upset about data centers which are about the most benign industrial facilities ever.

The noise complaint stems from their emergency generators, which never run except for the rare instances when they lose power, or the occasional cases in which the power company begs them to run them so that YOU don’t lose power.

The water complaint could be legitimate in arid climates like Arizona and Utah, but it’s silly in the eastern half of the US.

Pollution is very light, too. In short, it’s all nonsense.

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Stray power scam returns

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some older baw in a cowboy hat said it so it must be true

Powering the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens seems like a pretty big negative affect.

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c., but we are hating data centers

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People fear what they don't know

Have materials, equipment, and resources for non-data center projects pushed out with long lead times and high demand costs. Have eaten up all of the construction labor as well. If your company is planning a major construction project, you better reconsider your budgets because labor and material demands of the ongoing and planned data center projects.

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There are a multitude of news accounts of the generators running constantly.

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There are multiple news accounts of aliens taking over.

I’ve been to data centers. I’ve gone over the economics on a couple of them. The diesel generators yield extremely expensive electricity. The main value proposition on data center siting is cheap power. If a data center has to run their diesel generators “constantly” then they are failing, UNLESS the power company is paying them to do it. There are rare occasions in which this happens often, but the problem is with the power company not the data center.

And BTW, this would be a fairly easy thing to proscribe in the approval phase of the project.

The environmental impacts of data centers are often overstated. Depending on the site and cooling technology, the overall land-use impact can be relatively minimal. Water consumption has been one of the biggest concerns, but many of the newer hyperscale facilities are transitioning to closed-loop or recirculating cooling systems in response to public concerns and sustainabilitygoals. There is a localized heat effect around the facilities, but it is generally comparable to other large industrial or manufacturing developments.

From an economic development perspective, the real opportunity for municipalities extends beyond the initial property tax revenue. Forward-thinking communities are structuring tax agreements so that taxes are assessed not only on the building and land, but also when the computing equipment is replaced.

AI hardware,NVIDIA GPUs,, becomes obsolete in 2 years, with major technology refreshes often occurring every three years-ish. Much like replacing a laptop every few years, hyperscale operators continually upgrade their servers to remain competitive. When local tax structures capture those equipment replacement, communities benefit from recurring tax revenue rather than relying solely on the initial investment, creating a long-term economic tax gain ......instead of a one-time development payment. Our politicans just need to be educated.... bring me a data center over an ammonia facility anyday.