Lots of places don’t. Some spin yarns describing job creation and huge economic opportunities, which are largely bullshit, in exchange for large tax exemptions. In Alaska, the people get money, directly, not just some institutions.

The cartoon evil part is less about the data centres and how they speak of AI.

Whether it’s A16Z tweeting about how the value of all white collar wages is their market or Anthropic basically saying entry level jobs are done.

It’s also very much about GPU-focused data centers. They’ve been installing essentially illegal (with shaky loopholes) gas-powered turbines on site with no emissions control to speak of, in populated areas. They’ve made local governments sign NDAs, under false promises of huge economic development and job creation, preventing them from telling residents that the big real estate project in the Eries was a data center. Cartoonish.

Oh, they do that too, but it's cartoonishly evil to go in and ask for property tax abatements and for the local ratepayers to support your infrastructure when you have valuations in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

It's hard for the citizens who live nearby to learn about all of that when the idiotic SV execs forced their civic leadership to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Somehow, they just recently learned that was a bad idea.

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-says-it-is-going-to-stop-...

https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-to-stop-using-ndas-with-l...

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda...

Psychotic? Likely. Arrogant? Unquestionably. Maniacal? Utterly. Cunning? Indeed. Delusional? Arguably. But I wouldn’t call them idiotic, per se.

If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

I mostly agree with you, and obviously there is a lot of intelligence in the valley, but there doesn't seem to be much wisdom.

I think they couldn’t see it because they’re steeped in the cult of AI, and far too arrogant, maniacal, et al to read the room. I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.

I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.

Well, I for one think self-awareness is a much higher order of intelligence than clever manipulation of symbols or the external world, so I still find it stupid. Finding a workaround for the inability to have ironic self-distance is kind of the most pointless, dumbest activity I can even think of.

> I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.

Even in discussions here I'm constantly put off by comments that are this hand-rubbing talking to oneself about how the "AI haters" are all stupid, or how they can be forced to use or consume things they don't want against their will. It kind of baits all the sociopaths out into the open, because if their deus ex machina is about to show up, why bother with the tedious masking?

> I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.

No, but you can be emotionally stunted to force you to be dumb. Call it narcissism or whatever, but no sense of others or self = constant need to rewrite the world around you, and fearing logic and honesty like a vampire would fear sunlight. A dumb person can learn, people who are forced to act dumb cannot. They are still, effectively, very dumb. They will go to their graves dumber than an illiterate or mentally handicapped person. Not knowing a bunch of things that are true is meh... but thinking you know a trillion things that are all just the scab on a wound that happened in childhood, none of them true, and one dumber than the other, now that is astonishingly dumb.

I think we’re pretty firmly in semantic territory here.

They did see it coming. Thus all the secrecy, and why datacenters in space have seen so much attention the past few years.

Maybe they didn't predict the magnitude and vitriol of the backlash, but NIMBY resistance to all infrastructure projects has only been growing over the years. For example, wrt solar and wind power. It was obvious data centers were going to see at least as much resistance because you need to build the data centers and more power generation.

Do data centers in space make less sense than build outs in more accommodating countries? Not necessarily. It's not an either/or thing, and it all depends on the concrete bottom line numbers. In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything. More accomodating countries tend to be poorer with worse infrastructure, so there are more unknown risks. And you don't need to develop or manage a foreign workforce, which is why 100% of Silicon Valley jobs didn't instantly jump to India or Poland.

I don't understand how data centres in space make any sense at all given the heat constraints. Has there been some plausible breakthrough in heat dissipation technology recently?

No, but every day, armchair business analysts and people high on AI optimism expand the infinite frontier of blind faith and unfounded optimism in the future value of LLM infrastructure.

Radiative cooling isn't as big of an impediment as people think. It's part of the reason why a desert that's 120F+ during the day gets so cold so fast unless there's cloud cover to radiate back.[1] IIUC correctly, the theoretical maximum is over 400 watts per square meter, and existing tech can achieve 80-90+% of that. It's an engineering challenge, but no more than creating reusable rockets. The real challenge is building a reliable convective system from the heat source to the radiating mechanism, and just the general problems of building a compact package for delivery that then unpacks and orients itself once in orbit. No new science is required, and you can pencil things out today the same way Musk did when penciling out the economics of building a reusable rocket.

[1] Convection effects are also involved, but that cuts both ways as the air is also radiating back at you. A significant fraction of the net cooling is pure radiative.

> In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything.

You ignore global geopolitics at your own peril. In space you have no government to protect you when a hostile nation state blows up your infrastructure.

> If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

Because the backlash isn't actually about the data centers, it's about AI. 80% of the complaints about data centers are uninformed nonsense and the remaining 20% only apply to the ones where they're doing something that isn't actually required, like burning fossil fuels to power them. Which you can tell because the demands look like "stop building data centers" rather than "to build one you have to add 110% as many watt hours in new non-fossil fuel generation to the grid as you use".

Funnily enough, the last comment I made before this chain was saying literally exactly this. I completely agree.

Sufficiently advanced arrogance is indistinguishable from stupidity

The majority of data center bans on the ballot passed. I undertsand theres a little schadenfruede in calling them idiotic, but the outcome doesnt realy scream competence. These execs arent beating the allegations if not being able to pass a ninth grade civics class

https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/how-many-anti-da...

It depends on the company building the data center and the competence of the government approving the plan. https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/rural-louisiana-roa...

Oh yes, there is lots of money going to the places near me getting DCs. Specifically to the politicians who conveniently happen to own the land the DCs are built on or construction companies that are building them.

Someone ought to tell the voters who supported all the anti data center propositions and politicians that they're wrong and just imagining it not being handled well.

In seriousness this is an example of the previous point. Rather than engaging with the issue the tech/DC industry seems to think they can wordplay their way out of it by quibbling about irrelevant technical details and people are primed to get extremely angry at grinfucking type behaviour nowadays.

Yes, voters are very frequently wrong and support lots of policies that end up hurting everyone, such as rent controls.

What a bizarre non-sequitir to a vague topic. Are you incapable of following a topic or just being disingenuous when confronted with trying to argue that single humans and top down edicts are infallible?