Why data centers went from welcome guests to NIMBY targets
Places such as Virginia and Georgia in the US, which once welcomed data centers for the jobs and tax revenue they promised, turned against them after finding that the facilities employ fewer than 100 on-site staff while only adding to the strain on power and water. The pattern is one in which data centers must be built on time for the sake of national competitiveness, yet NIMBY sentiment — just not in my neighborhood — stands in the way of Big Tech securing sites. That Google is building near the Arctic Circle in places like Norway, that Naver built in Chuncheon, a cool city in Korea, and that even desert, offshore and space data centers are being discussed shows how scarce land sites have become. The real bottleneck is power rather than water, because a data center building goes up in 3 years while expanding power infrastructure takes 10–15 years, and water cooling can be replaced with electricity. Most of this, including the figure that Google alone uses about 2% of the world's electricity, is unsourced verbal diagnosis, so it is used here only as background.
Key points
- Data centers have fewer than 100 on-site staff; the expected jobs never came, so opinion flipped
- The real bottleneck is the speed gap: 3 years for a building vs 10–15 years for power infrastructure
- Water cooling can be replaced by electricity, so power is the bottleneck that comes first
- Alternative sites — the Arctic, Chuncheon, deserts, offshore, space — signal that land sites are running out
This is a note: my own write-up after reading several sources. It has no source link; events checked against a source are kept as records.