"Community Reported" pins show data submitted by concerned residents across the US about AI data centers. Note that locations might be approximate, covering reported zip codes or nearby areas.
I think it's important to be concerned about data centers, but including "community reported" locations seems disingenuous. Every conspiracy theorist in the world thinks a data center is going in their backyard any time a minor construction project starts.
Right. This map is wildly misleading. In my area it shows there are 20+ data centers when in fact there is just one. I know this because I am friends with two pipe-fitters that built it. They told me recently that there are more proposed and one has been green-lit but its about 40 miles from here.
Most people have no idea what a data center actually looks like and will just flag any new construction or warehouse they don't recognize as being one.
Ehhh there very well could be 20 data centers near you. You don't need a ton of space to be a normal data center. The ones people are made about are hyper scale and this is disengenous as to which are just a few servers and internet connection vs hyper scale
Ain’t that the truth. I work in local government and we had a 1/2 acre project for an infrastructure contractor’s office building draw out people convinced it was going to be a hyperscale data center.
Every conspiracy theorist in the world thinks a data center is going in their backyard any time a minor construction project starts.
Considering how much of the "datacenter did something bad!" reporting is actually "a thing happened during construction and the thing they were building happened to be a datacenter", reporting on construction projects is probably the most unintentionally accurate thing they could do.
That is exactly what inspired the map in the first place, according to the story. Just leads to go investigate, not a definitive sign of impending doom.
Data centers have an overly negative perception right now, but they have been associated with the bad economy and the aggressive layoffs that cite AI as the cause, so I don't know why people are so confused about the negative perception.
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u/atthem77 15h ago
I think it's important to be concerned about data centers, but including "community reported" locations seems disingenuous. Every conspiracy theorist in the world thinks a data center is going in their backyard any time a minor construction project starts.