Data Centers and the One Good NIMBY
By: Michael Boehmcke
The Surprising Victory of the NIMBY Ideology
As the AI “revolution” continues its unabated take-over of the technological and financial world, one of the questions of pre-eminent concern that has arisen among people more cautious to it’s effects are the concerns about the environmental impact that running the data centers that power the LLMs will have. It’s not just the concern about local wildlife and environmental damage, but also the worries of the people who live in the neighborhoods where these data centers are being built and how the infrastructure could impact their lives more directly than just the slow, choking death of the planet.
I’m from Chesapeake, Virginia, a city that essentially nobody who isn’t from the Hampton Roads area has heard of despite it being the 2nd largest city in Virginia by population. It’s a sprawling complex of suburban sprawl interspersed with farmland and swamps, and recently an AI data center was proposed to be built in one of the even less densely populated areas than the average. On the edge of a suburb near Etheridge Manor Blvd and Centerville Turnpike, near some fallow farms, is an abandoned plot of land where the data center was proposed to be built. Immediately, the population of the city went up in arms and signed petitions, visited the city council, and e-mailed the mayor pushing them to deny the permits for the project.
From the way I’ve described Chesapeake, and depending on your pre-disposition towards AI, what I’ve described sounds like the panicked reactions of a bunch of middle class NIMBY’s (Not In My BackYards) who are so terrified of paying a cent more in taxes that they would eliminate their curbside recycling program to shave a penny off their tax bill. And while you’d be right about the elimination of curbside recycling, for the most part the people of Chesapeake are open to civil re-development if it brings further economic gains to the area. For instance, Chesapeake allowed their main power substation to be a primary connection point to the offshore wind farm that was nearly finished with being constructed, despite the introduction of an entirely new, massive series of power lines and pylons that were needed for the connection to be introduced.
No, the backlash to the datacenter was not driven by a misguided fear of falling property values, but instead was predicated on the concern that all of the investment the city had made to new power infrastructure would be consumed by a single project. The connection to the offshore wind farm wasn’t just to provide a small boon to the city’s tax revenue, but promised a long term drop in electric bills across the board. The introduction of the data center would have immediately erased those gains and forced the city to raise prices outside the scope of inflation. Additionally, for the major investment the city would have had to undertake to finance the data center, very little return was being offered. There were reports that as few as a dozen jobs would actually be created in the city.
Add to the cost of building the center the actual environmental cost to the area, such as the massive noise and water pollution that so often accompanies the data centers, and I fully support the choice of Chesapeake to deny the permits to this data center. Even if the choice was not made explicitly to protect the delicate wetland ecosystems and migratory birds that rely on them, and offer immense benefits to the city like flood protection, I’m glad to know that this project never got off the ground.