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Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
191–200 of 514 posts
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the opposite of the truth. For instance: https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2026-08-04/dekalb-and-aurora...
No, it's exactly the truth: https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/subsidizing-servers-how-states-a... The legislatures are betting that the data centers stick around or bring in jobs. They won't. They think something that expensive must require a ton of jobs to maintain. It doesn't. They need low taxes, cheap land, cheap water, and cheap power.
I'd think that the claim
>Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
is not at all supported as "exactly the truth" by a link that lists 11 states with property tax abatements, most of which are not full exemptions. Am I mistaken?
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#193I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood That…
> That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet .
Oh come on. 95% of new data centers are obviously for LLMs not communications
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility) The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building. htt…
I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape.
Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time.
Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity.
These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box. I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact wit…
Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.
> nobody moralizes office buildings
I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?
Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's the unfortunate thing about the current climate around datacenters I always get a chuckle when I see people complaining about datacenters on the Internet .
You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system. In fact, that's probably required to actually make any changes. No one is going to listen to some crazy kook in a cabin in Montana
> You can advocate for changes to a system while living and existing within the system.
I see very little advocating for change and a whole lot of knee-jerk reactions to shut it down.
The data center protests near me tried to complain about noise as one of their points, even though the DC was in the middle of nowhere
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them. Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air…
The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns. What frustrates me about the new po…
> The water thing is, I think, baloney
It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places.
What exactly are you saying is baloney?
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#198What I think is nice is that the political parties opposed to data center development are actually taking concrete steps, exercising specific powers, to advance their goals. So much opposition to tech boils down to whining, and then the tech companies get to do whatever they want anyway. Same complaint applies generally to the democratic establishment. It's nice to see people finally waking up to the reality that opp…
If the city thinks data centers are incompatible with certain areas, it should encode that through zoning, permitting, utility pricing, noise limits, etc.
We have those but data centers keep skirting them. Data center developers often classify their properties as "light industrial" or "warehouse" to bypass regulation. These lobbyists are also big enough to push state legislation that strips local towns and counties of land-use authority.
Noise regulation is also sorely lacking because it's usually based on absolute decibel and ignores the impact of low-frequency continuous hums or even infrasound
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#199I don't know what DC Blox was going to put in this particular datacenter, but they are a "traditional" colocation datacenter company. Maybe this one would've been superdense GPUs with a jet engine as electrical generator causing all kinds of noise, but it's also just as likely this would've been a project that 5 years ago no one would've batted an eye over, and wouldn't cause any issues in the local neighborhood That…
> There's still a need for growth in just traditional datacenters hosting things like your email and Netflix, not just AI, and those projects are going to get swallowed up in the AI hubbub
Growth in almost any datacenters is not worth the environmental cost, and even the benefits are dubious (e.g. more datacenters to host Netflix content is a net negative if it means people spend more time sedentary indoors).
Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
#200In speaking with non-technical friends who are anti-data centers, I get the impression that they only recently discovered what a data center even was and are oblivious to how much they use data centers in their daily lives outside of AI. But I don’t fault them even if they’re misinformed. AI is a big power grab by the wealthy and people feel helpless and are acting in the only way they think they can.
Regardless of a datacenter being for AI or not, NIMBY applies to everyone. I look forward to these totally probable datacenters in space.
NIMBYs are the reason San Francisco doesn't have massive freeways splitting through the center of it. Sometimes NIMBYs get things right