this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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It's a phenomenon called NIMBY and it's not specific to data centers.
NIMBY is usually more to do with perceived loss in value though no?
People don't want AI datacenters because they are directly offloading energy costs to neighborhoods via substantially higher power bills. Which is happening because the demand is so high, they can't compensate by building more power sources in the same time frame.
That and the poor reception to the AI market, which is wrecking jobs, the economy, etc.
Otherwise, datacenters were pretty well known for being built with very little resistance before this, especially since lots of providers, like Google, would fund geopower sources to power their datacenters which would add power to the grid with surplus.
The distinction is that NIMBYs only object to the infrastructure when it's in their back yard. I think the majority of people object to these data centers anywhere, but only have voting power to directly oppose them in their back yards, so that's where their effort is spent. I haven't seen anyone say "I definitely want another massive datacenter to go up, just not here."