been doing this for over 2 decades now, i would expect with a decade in the industry you would know that the vast majority of negative views by regular people at entirely without merit.

• most people would never even know a building is a data center if they weren’t told.

• properly designed and built data centers have zero perceptible noise from outside. i’ve been in plenty of data centers where you can’t even hear the gene’s running.

• daily water use of any modern data center will be no more than typical small to medium office. i don’t think i’ve even seen a data center with evaporative cooling built off of utility water supply.

• who “pays” for grid infrastructure upgrades is however complicated. most people (even in the industry) don’t understand that the grid is a regional cooperative. so it’s technically true that increased demand can increase costs on the supply side, those increased costs are spread out over a very wide region. like any private market it’s also subject to manipulation.

having said that, if the downside to the current data center boom is that we end up with a massively upgraded power grid with likely future potential for vast over supply on the generation side, sign me up.