this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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I dislike hypocrisy as much as the next person. So I feel where you're coming from. At the same time, the wind turbines are generating power that everyone benefits from, whereas these things are consuming power for a product that very few people actually like or even want to exist. So I think its fair to say that maybe the noise is tolerable when you're getting something you actually want out of it. Also, wind farms are usually built further away from large population centers, whereas data centers are because it's cheaper to build them in areas with lots of people around. So the concern does seem a little more irrelevant to wind farming as a whole than data centers.
Just out of curiosity, what makes them cheaper to build in populated areas? Doesn’t that mean the land value is higher when purchasing/leasing the site?
The article alludes to it: "The United States does not lack flat, open land away from population centers on which to build data centers. However, AI hyperscalers prefer to locate their campuses near existing infrastructure so they don’t have to spend massive amounts of time and resources building everything from scratch."
It costs a lotta money to run electricity and water to the middle of nowhere.
Also, companies are doing research to specifically build in areas where they believe the local community is not politically empowered to prevent it from being built. This guy goes into some more depth at this timestamp: https://youtu.be/1CpVmPh3BDE?t=831
Fascinating thank you. Brings me back to ArcMap training days. I wonder if they have some data layer for “local population acceptance factor”.
I'm sure they do. Probably using an AI model to calculate it tbh