The Lies They're Telling Towns And Tribes About The Benefits Of AI Data Centers

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I really "enjoyed" (read: didn't enjoy at all) this recent piece in The Atlantic (non-paywalled archive link) proclaiming that the backlash to AI data centers is "overblown." It's part of a broader effort by our affluent brunchlord press to dismiss the massive bipartisan opposition to AI data centers as a sort of inauthentic hysteria or un-American foreign influence op.

One lie that companies have been telling local municipalities is that if they greenlight a massive local AI data center, it will immediately bring a flood of savvy innovators to your podunk-ass town.

The Atlantic piece introduces the lie this way:<br>Michael Mandel, the chief economist for the Progressive Policy Institute, told me that employment gains are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI. Companies using the technology for advanced applications—such as for autonomous vehicles and medical research—may benefit from proximity to these centers, because information can travel faster from source to user. The margin is imperceptible to most people using Claude or ChatGPT, but for companies that depend on real-time AI-powered decision making at scale, tiny differences in latency matter. The kinds of businesses that will drive the AI economy are thus likely to set up in communities that invest in data centers.<br>The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is, just so we're clear, not progressive. Or an institute in any meaningful sense. It's one of countless corporate-sponsored "nonprofit" think tanks that obscure their funding sources and try to dress up greed (and a relentless desire for no corporate oversight) as a meaningful intellectual argument people should seriously engage with.

These organizations are useful to corporate power because they parrot the goals and aims of corporate power, but they do so under a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-academic veneer designed to trick news audiences into believing they're reading the scientific insights of an objective subject matter expert.

I've run into the PPI consistently during my research on broadband. They can often be found breathlessly insisting that modest oversight of shitty telecom monopolies will stifle innovation, or that popular, community-owned and operated broadband networks are some kind of reckless socialism run amok.

Anyway, the Institute's spokesperson, Mr. Mandel, is lying. Plunking down an AI data center in the middle of rural West Virginia will not magically draw a bunch of innovative new startups to the region. And the 5ms or so lower latency from having a server farm in your backyard offers no tangible difference to AI service quality.

That's simply not an actual thing.

Another lazy logical trick data center apologists like to employ is to point to other things we already know are worse than AI data centers to try and downplay very real harms. That comes up particularly often as it pertains to AI data center water use, as The Atlantic does here:<br>In 2023, data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters of water. That number sounds alarming, until you realize that America’s golf courses used almost 2 trillion liters that same year.<br>One, 2023 was already three years ago. Two, just because AI data center water use isn't the most pressing issue, doesn't mean it's not an issue. Ask Cheyenne, Wisconsin. Ask Memphis, Tennessee. Ask Mansfield, Georgia.<br>The rest of the Atlantic piece isn't any better. The author urges readers to ignore the relentless thrum, regional pollution, higher local electrical costs, and potential impact to the local water volume and quality, and embrace the idea that AI data centers are innovation magnets and big job creators.

But most of the jobs are in construction, and even here, there's nothing really stopping companies from shipping out-of-town subcontractors in to do the work.

Once the data center is created, there's very few actual jobs created. And in a country so corrupt that it no longer has functional labor regulators, there's nothing stopping those jobs from being imported as well. Or the workers from being abused or union-busted should the company actually utilize the local labor pool.<br>What towns ultimately wind up getting is a giant fenced-off campus that drives up local power rates (or worse) and can pollute or strain the local water supply; of particular note since the majority of AI data centers are being constructed in drought-stricken areas already being pummeled by climate change.

Remind me: are golf courses also causing the lion's share of corporate America to abandon their already-pathetic climate change goals? Did we conveniently forget that the orchestra is only getting warmed up for an environmental apocalypse?

These companies aren't coincidentally aiming construction at states and municipalities that are too broken and corrupted to put up meaningful regulatory opposition. They've also started trying to...