Red state residents lead growing rebellion against data centers that Trump loves

Say it aint so · Thursday at 2:19 PM

President Donald Trump's administration has been heralding the construction of data centers to power artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure across the country. But many red state residents are becoming increasingly angry about data centers' intrusion on their rural communities.

That's according to a Tuesday article by the Washington Post's Evan Halper entitled "The data center rebellion is here, and it's reshaping the political landscape," which reported that residents in deep-red states like Indiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere are showing up in droves to public hearings solely to speak out against proposed data center construction. The Post zeroed in on an ongoing conflict over a planned data center in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, where Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) has championed the project.

"We know Trump wants data centers and Kevin Stitt wants data centers, but these things don’t affect these people," Trump supporter Brian Ingram said. "You know, this affects us."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright admitted that the data centers are unpopular as they have been tied to higher utility costs in adjacent communities, due to their immense power requirements. And the Post noted that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has also railed against data centers due to both their electricity consumption and their draining of precious freshwater sources. MSN

Maybe there is hope they will realize what they voted for.

Keep in mind the Trump admin is fighting tooth and nail to prevent states from being to regulate these data centers, with the same vigor they are trying to prevent states from regulating gambling taking place in their own states.

Just what America needs, more degenerate gamblers.

chevyontheriver · Thursday at 6:17 PM

Say it aint so said:
President Donald Trump's administration has been heralding the construction of data centers to power artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure across the country. But many red state residents are becoming increasingly angry about data centers' intrusion on their rural communities.
That's according to a Tuesday article by the Washington Post's Evan Halper entitled "The data center rebellion is here, and it's reshaping the political landscape," which reported that residents in deep-red states like Indiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere are showing up in droves to public hearings solely to speak out against proposed data center construction. The Post zeroed in on an ongoing conflict over a planned data center in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, where Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) has championed the project.

"We know Trump wants data centers and Kevin Stitt wants data centers, but these things don’t affect these people," Trump supporter Brian Ingram said. "You know, this affects us."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright admitted that the data centers are unpopular as they have been tied to higher utility costs in adjacent communities, due to their immense power requirements. And the Post noted that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has also railed against data centers due to both their electricity consumption and their draining of precious freshwater sources. MSN

Maybe there is hope they will realize what they voted for.

Keep in mind the Trump admin is fighting tooth and nail to prevent states from being to regulate these data centers, with the same vigor they are trying to prevent states from regulating gambling taking place in their own states.

Just what America needs, more degenerate gamblers.

I am really down on them to. They are not at all environmental friendly.

RocksInMyHead · Thursday at 8:12 PM

chevyontheriver said:
I am really down on them to. They are not at all environmental friendly.

They're not environmentally friendly (they use tons of water), and they also significantly drive up utility prices. My state electric utility has requested an 8% rate hike for the next fiscal year, and has nearly doubled rates since I moved here in 2020. A large part of that is due to increased demand from AI data centers, which the state is going to great lengths to attract.

chevyontheriver · Thursday at 10:33 PM

RocksInMyHead said:
They're not environmentally friendly (they use tons of water), and they also significantly drive up utility prices. My state electric utility has requested an 8% rate hike for the next fiscal year, and has nearly doubled rates since I moved here in 2020. A large part of that is due to increased demand from AI data centers, which the state is going to great lengths to attract.

I foresee many many new power plants in our future, and many of those nuclear. But also a huge solar and wind push so they can claim this is all 'carbon neutral'. All the farmland that will be used for solar panels will be it's own catastrophe, but the power plants will be needed to provide for those frequent times when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. All so they can store and manipulate more and more data about our personal lives. It's all rather distopian.

Pommer · 2026-02-20T00:27:49-0600

chevyontheriver said:
I foresee many many new power plants in our future, and many of those nuclear. But also a huge solar and wind push so they can claim this is all 'carbon neutral'. All the farmland that will be used for solar panels will be it's own catastrophe, but the power plants will be needed to provide for those frequent times when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. All so they can store and manipulate more and more data about our personal lives. It's all rather distopian.

Nuclear is a great source for electrical generation, until it’s not. Then the “not” turns into a long time.
But as it is, we will have no choice but to make it easier to run nuclear reactors for this reason.

Matt5 · 2026-02-20T03:41:21-0600

AI data centers are just warehouses with huge energy consumption. So the problem is the energy. They should be generating their own power.

Desk trauma · 2026-02-20T04:35:34-0600

chevyontheriver said:
I foresee many many new power plants in our future, and many of those nuclear.

US construction companies are incapable of bringing new nuclear capacity on line without decades of delays and billions in cost overruns. There’s zero chance of many new reactors coming on line before the AI tulip bulb insanity collides with reality.

Tuur · 2026-02-20T05:45:21-0600

RocksInMyHead said:
They're not environmentally friendly (they use tons of water), and they also significantly drive up utility prices. My state electric utility has requested an 8% rate hike for the next fiscal year, and has nearly doubled rates since I moved here in 2020. A large part of that is due to increased demand from AI data centers, which the state is going to great lengths to attract.

Data centers are the latest bugaboo. Seriously. They've eclipsed cyber currency mining as a complaint. The curious thing is that it's been city dwellers telling rural dwellers "Oh, you don't want that" when it comes to data centers. And cities tend to be blue.

Note that we'll have to build increased capacity even if another data center is never built and another factory never opens just from the increase in population. I will admit to finding it funny in a grim way to hear local Democrats claim data centers are an energy problem, then turn right around and say we don't need more generation capacity.

FireDragon76 · 2026-02-20T05:57:30-0600

Pommer said:
Nuclear is a great source for electrical generation, until it’s not. Then the “not” turns into a long time.
But as it is, we will have no choice but to make it easier to run nuclear reactors for this reason.

Nuclear requires alot of public sector investment, private corporations are almost never interested in footing the bill because nuclear plants have high up-front costs.

FireDragon76 · 2026-02-20T06:07:07-0600

AI could be done better, i've seen that up close as personal. Right now the main focus is scale, not efficiency, because the AI bubble is essentially being driven by magical thinking, myth, and FOMO (fear of missing out), not serious reflection on the science. Some newer models that use a diffusion approach instead of transformers or convolutional neural networks are more efficient at just producing fluent chatbot style text.

I've been working on a chess engine focused on computational efficiency, to feed the output into a smaller model for natural language analysis. But it's tough to convince your average techie this is a better approach than developing massively scaled models that are "intelligent", when what is really needed is more specialization: that requires valuing human beings with actual domain expertise and thinking seriously about first principles. Right now Silicon Valley and Wall Street are deluded by technological fantasy, wanting to take human beings completely out of the loop if possible.

RocksInMyHead · 2026-02-20T07:35:10-0600

Tuur said:
Data centers are the latest bugaboo. Seriously. They've eclipsed cyber currency mining as a complaint.

They are, essentially, the same thing as far as impact goes. And a lot more companies are building data centers than are building crypto mining operations now, so it makes sense that people are complaining about data centers more.

Tuur said:
The curious thing is that it's been city dwellers telling rural dwellers "Oh, you don't want that" when it comes to data centers.

The OP article would seem to disagree with your claim.

Tuur said:
Note that we'll have to build increased capacity even if another data center is never built and another factory never opens just from the increase in population. I will admit to finding it funny in a grim way to hear local Democrats claim data centers are an energy problem, then turn right around and say we don't need more generation capacity.

I don't believe that I - or anyone in this thread, for that matter - have ever made that argument. The US absolutely needs more electrical generation capacity, and we need to modernize our grid as well. But if we're just building new capacity to power data centers, that's very little benefit to the consumer.

chevyontheriver · 2026-02-20T08:09:20-0600

Desk trauma said:
US construction companies are incapable of bringing new nuclear capacity on line without decades of delays and billions in cost overruns. There’s zero chance of many new reactors coming on line before the AI tulip bulb insanity collides with reality.

That doesn’t prevent billions of dollars of ‘investment’ in such nuclear plants all paid for by plain old electric ratepayers just trying to keep the lights on and the fridge running. Higher rates for electricity will be needed to finance the AI power demand.

Desk trauma · 2026-02-20T08:16:03-0600

chevyontheriver said:
That doesn’t prevent billions of dollars of ‘investment’ in such nuclear plants all paid for by plain old electric ratepayers just trying to keep the lights on and the fridge running. Higher rates for electricity will be needed to finance the AI power demand.

Yep, billions more down the bottomless nuclear pit with nothing to show for it save some very substantial concrete pours that will slowly fill with rain water. Oh, and all the debt.

chevyontheriver · 2026-02-20T08:19:00-0600

Tuur said:
Data centers are the latest bugaboo. Seriously. They've eclipsed cyber currency mining as a complaint. The curious thing is that it's been city dwellers telling rural dwellers "Oh, you don't want that" when it comes to data centers. And cities tend to be blue.

Note that we'll have to build increased capacity even if another data center is never built and another factory never opens just from the increase in population. I will admit to finding it funny in a grim way to hear local Democrats claim data centers are an energy problem, then turn right around and say we don't need more generation capacity.

For a few decades now we have had increases in efficiency that have been able to reduce electric demands. Better motors, better lights, better appliances, better air conditioners, better TVs. This has been an application of Amory Lovin’s ‘soft energy path’. Crypto mining has been irresponsible and data centers are irresponsible, both as massive demands. But just think of the demands if the computer hardware were all 1990’s vintage power sucking CPUs.

chevyontheriver · 2026-02-20T08:30:45-0600

Matt5 said:
AI data centers are just warehouses with huge energy consumption. So the problem is the energy. They should be generating their own power.

Warehouses for our personal data. Where we go, what we buy, who we talk to, even what we eat and think. Feed all that into the AI to figure out what to sell us next.

Say it aint so · 2026-02-20T10:08:53-0600

Tuur said:
Data centers are the latest bugaboo. Seriously. They've eclipsed cyber currency mining as a complaint. The curious thing is that it's been city dwellers telling rural dwellers "Oh, you don't want that" when it comes to data centers. And cities tend to be blue.

Note that we'll have to build increased capacity even if another data center is never built and another factory never opens just from the increase in population. I will admit to finding it funny in a grim way to hear local Democrats claim data centers are an energy problem, then turn right around and say we don't need more generation capacity.

It's just not a blue city thing. Most centers are built in red states with red state government rolling out the red carpet without consideration of any energy or noise mitigation. Those in red states speak up because they are experiencing it. I recall Trump has literally instructed his admin to sue if states try to regulate data centers. I don't think anyone is saying they don't need more energy capacity. It's what a lot of the infrastructure package was about.

rambot · 2026-02-20T10:35:27-0600

chevyontheriver said:
I am really down on them to. They are not at all environmental friendly.

While that is certainly a BIG deal for me too, I have heard stories of utility bills SKYROCKETTING in places with these centres.

I don't understand why every Data centre being developed should have a policy where it would have to self generate at least 50% of it's own power usage. If these are real estate (and water, and energy) PIGS in the communities whree they get put, why shouldn't they have the expectation that they generate some of their own power?

chevyontheriver · 2026-02-20T11:06:55-0600

rambot said:
While that is certainly a BIG deal for me too, I have heard stories of utility bills SKYROCKETTING in places with these centres.

I don't understand why every Data centre being developed should have a policy where it would have to self generate at least 50% of it's own power usage. If these are real estate (and water, and energy) PIGS in the communities whree they get put, why shouldn't they have the expectation that they generate some of their own power?

IF they had a 50% generation rule there would be a coal train a day pulling up to their facility. And coal dust blowing off the coal heap. And even MORE water used, depleting local wells.

Oh, but they could solve all of that with solar. NOT! These places need constant and reliable power. Because they need constant reliable power the rest of us will get the fluctuating and interruptable power. So when they tell you they have invested in clean solar power it is more than likely they paneled over a bunch of farmland AND THEY STILL need coal or nuclear plants to keep their chips swimming in reliable base load Amps.

Oh, but they could solve it with tiny on site nuclear plants. Tell me about it. The only thing I know is everybody will be paying more for electricity so these places can keep all of their data on us in ready RAM.

Tuur · 2026-02-20T11:37:37-0600

Say it aint so said:
It's just not a blue city thing. Most centers are built in red states with red state government rolling out the red carpet without consideration of any energy or noise mitigation. Those in red states speak up because they are experiencing it. I recall Trump has literally instructed his admin to sue if states try to regulate data centers. I don't think anyone is saying they don't need more energy capacity. It's what a lot of the infrastructure package was about.

Please reread my post: It’s blue cities telling red rural areas that we don’t want data centers. Let that be our decision, not their’s.

Tuur · 2026-02-20T11:47:53-0600

chevyontheriver said:
For a few decades now we have had increases in efficiency that have been able to reduce electric demands. Better motors, better lights, better appliances, better air conditioners, better TVs. This has been an application of Amory Lovin’s ‘soft energy path’. Crypto mining has been irresponsible and data centers are irresponsible, both as massive demands. But just think of the demands if the computer hardware were all 1990’s vintage power sucking CPUs.

Dropping energy use per consumer due to increased energy efficiency of appliances. Note: unless a load is mostly lighting, shifting to LEDs doesn’t have as much impact as some think.

Anyway, dropping energy use per consumer is offset by increased numbers of consumers, whether data centers or crypto mining is built or not.

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Red state residents lead growing rebellion against data centers that Trump loves

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