NIMBYs threaten to sink Project Sail, a $17B datacenter development in Georgia

A county in the US state of Georgia is facing opposition to the construction of a massive hyperscale datacenter campus, reflecting the growing concerns of communities in America and elsewhere over the rush to build more cloud and AI infrastructure. Controversy highlights the growing conflict between an industry that wants to …

[pimppetgaeghsr]

I wonder will we see these empty datacentres and semicon fabs enter pop culture like the disused mental asylums entered horror movies back in the day.

A horror movie where the derelict datacentres harbour fragments of an artificial intelligence that just wants to help people auto complete their code and locks them in.

[m4r35n357]

. . . and even the zombies aren't interested in them ;)

[vtcodger]

Two sides to the story

Messenger: "The peasants are revolting."

King: "They certainly are."

Various sources apparently

==================

It's probably because I'm old, grumpy and set in my ways, but I'm inclined to agree with the peasants on this one. There's no obvious reason to store vast amounts of "data" in multiple places. And it's hard to see who benefits significantly other than the wheeler dealers promoting the deals. Sort of like building magnificent cathedrals and monuments while the populace starves and lives in squalor.

===================

Possibly relevant:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias: Percy Bysshe Shelley

[Like a badger]

Re: Two sides to the story

That's a bit f***ing cultural for a Friday afternoon, rather too much so for me.

[vincent himpe]

Re: Two sides to the story

quote : There's no obvious reason to store vast amounts of "data" in multiple places

Let's ditch all the backups then. While we're at it. The internet could use a good scrub. Replace all duplicate files with pointers to one file . You can probably save 99.99% of space.

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Water

I've always been confused about this, maybe a data-center expert could clarify.

Obviously water is required for cooling, but surely it's presumably just then run off to a tank or something to cool and then recirculated? It's not just dumped into the drains, is it? Because it couldn't be economical to literally flush away 34 million liters of water a day just because it got warm going through a pipe. I have a server in a datacenter and I know they have cooling tanks, so I've presumed that's the industry norm...

[OhForF']

Re: Water

If you need to get rid of the heat 900 megawatts create round the clock by heating water and later just have that water sit around in tanks at ambient temperature you'd need some bloody big tanks. Probably not that economical either.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Water

You don't put it in tanks to cool on its own, you pump it through huge radiators with large fans to push the heat out. If necessary, you run it through a chiller after the fans take the bulk of the heat out. It takes power to do this, but it's far better to remove the heat and use a water/glycol coolant. And for such large power draws they should be using an on-site nuclear reactor instead of commercial power. If anything the bit barn should be providing excess power to the grid, not sucking the grid dry like a vampire.

[stiine]

Re: Water

Because the chillers use evaporative cooling.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Water

"Obviously water is required for cooling, but surely it's presumably just then run off to a tank or something to cool and then recirculated?"

It's more efficient to use evaporative cooling on a space basis which sends up a load of steam. If the bit barn were co-located with something like a citrus grove and lines underground kept the trees warm, that would be great in colder climates.

The data centers are looking for places where there is a big enough connection to the power grid and they can get the local government to pay for all of the upgrades that they would need. It's just like the big box stores that construct 15-year lifespan buildings and get cities to pay for all of the surrounding infrastructure they need by dangling the number of jobs they'll "create". In reality, they steal jobs from and destroy the high street, pay less wages (less tax), negotiate lower taxes all around and then will move when the store is worn out leaving behind a building that's useless for other things and has covenants in place that prohibit a competing business from occupying it. Of course, a big box store than sells darn near everything competes with every other store.

The cop out that zoning laws don't anticipate data centers is local politicians that don't know how to cope with those companies' lawyers. A generic set of requirements that prohibit a company from consuming over a certain percentage of existing available resources is easy enough. There should also be requirements that prohibit waivers for those requirements or it's too easy to circumvent. If they companies still want to locate there, they can put the money up to bring in the resources they need which is good for the locale. The city/region would wind up ahead when the companies go bust or move.

[DS999]

Re: Water

If I lived in a small town / rural area I'd want the zoning ordinance to require specific approval for any project over a certain size / dollar amount, whether that project was a datacenter, a Walmart Supercenter, a massive solar array, or a giant hog feed lot. Any of those would affect the quality of life you've enjoyed in one way or another, and the residents should have a chance to weigh in before it is allowed to proceed.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Water

> Walmart Supercenter

You mean like the ones they abandon after 5 years, and are completely unsuitable for any other purpose, so they sit there as a disused decaying blight on the area for another 15 years?

Not that I'm bitter.

[DS999]

Re: Water

Yeah maybe that's another requirement that should be added for building stuff like that - that if they vacate the site without finding as suitable replacement that the city/county agrees to accept they must demolish the building and return the area to a similar condition to what it was before it was built. If it isn't a giant company like Walmart doing it and is instead of some shell company like most of those datacenter deals, it has to a file a bond with the state providing those funds in case they try to duck their responsibility by declaring bankruptcy.

I've seen moves to require that in my state for wind turbines, but I think it is equally applicable to datacenters or Walmarts.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Water

"Yeah maybe that's another requirement that should be added for building stuff like that - that if they vacate the site without finding as suitable replacement that the city/county agrees to accept they must demolish the building and return the area to a similar condition to what it was before it was built. If it isn't a giant company like Walmart doing it and is instead of some shell company like most of those datacenter deals, it has to a file a bond with the state providing those funds in case they try to duck their responsibility by declaring bankruptcy."

The wording would have to be such that as soon as they cease using the building for its intended purpose, they have a limited time from that point to find a suitable reuse or return the site to a neutral state. How it was originally might be too much of an ask and also not ideal. The bond proposal is a good one with those funds in escrow earning interest as a gimmee to make the pill easier to swallow.

Wind turbines may not be a very good option for sites. It's certainly not a big deal to ask for rooftop solar as a way to offset the load on the local grid. Many big stores are doing that already and it's an easy calculation to codify minimum nameplate generation (100w/sqm or something).

[MachDiamond]

Re: Water

"You mean like the ones they abandon after 5 years, and are completely unsuitable for any other purpose, so they sit there as a disused decaying blight on the area for another 15 years?"

The stores are designed in a way that makes them unsuitable for reuse. If that was anticipated, power, water and sewer would be installed in such a way that would make sectioning off the building straightforward. The cost to do all of that work later it too prohibitive over bulldozing the site flat and starting over. Of course, the store can hold onto the property for years writing down the declining value due to neglect (tax avoidance) so nobody else can use the site. Chances are they negotiated another sweetheart deal with the next town over so they get another 5-10 years of tax abatements and a new store that's optimized for the area (now that they have solid sales figures).

City councils that approve these stores are an amateur operation at best. They have no chance to comprehend what the lawyers for the big box stores have compiled and handed to them and don't realize that they should be the ones creating the contract to sign and it's a losing game to begin with.

[retiredFool]

Re: Water

I think you hit the nail on the head with the lawyers. The Big Co lawyers are like sharks eating the city council guppies. One thing I have seen sneak into some of these tax abatement sweetheart deals is job count minimums. That might help them to not close it up. Of course most the guppies forget to add it. The pity is that corp's are not just people in the eyes of the law, they are special people.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Water

"One thing I have seen sneak into some of these tax abatement sweetheart deals is job count minimums. "

There should be a job count AND salary minimum. The big box stores often obliterate downtown shopping districts that might pay more per employee in wages and those shops also pay more in other taxes than the Walmarts, Targets and Home Depots. Replacing the lost jobs with minimum wage positions is a loss with the money generated through the store mostly leaving the local economy.

[JoeCool]

Re: Water

I'd want an annual resident kickback/lease payment in perpetuity

[Anonymous Coward]

""We have communities that don't want us there," complained Val Walsh, Microsoft's VP for Cloud Operations & Innovation. "We still have this lack of alignment from the general public as to why datacenters are needed, because they don't quite connect the fact that their entire life runs through datacenters."

I doubt anyone could encapsulate the arrogance and vapidity of this company any more clearly.

[OhForF']

We still have this lack of alignment from senior Micros~1 staffers as to why people resist being tracked and using AI, because they don't quite connect the fact that people do not have a benefit and thus do not want their entire life being run through datacenters.

[Vadheterdu]

Tucson, Arizona too

It wasn't as big a project as that behemoth, but recently the Tucson city council rejected a proposed data center on the outskirts of town, in large part because of the impact on an already-stressed water supply, and concerns about non-disclosure agreements. https://azluminaria.org/2025/08/06/tucson-city-council-rejects-project-blue-amid-intense-community-pressure/

[retiredFool]

Re: Tucson, Arizona too

Wow, good on Tucson. My first job out of school was at IBM/Tucson. It is desert. This was early 80's so IBM was pretty responsible back then. Landscaping was desert, and even with that recycled water irrigated it. It was a large facility, 5K I think. They also ran the chillers at night to save energy. And to give you some idea how dry for those not used to the desert, the house I rented used what was called swamp cooling. Basically a giant sized humidifier to cool the air. No A/C as we know it today. Worked ok, but then I think humidity was usually around 8% or less. The monsoon season I'd find a mall to hang out at and then suffer thru a sleepless hot muggy night. Fortunately monsoon season was about a week and a 1/2, pretty short.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Tucson, Arizona too

"the house I rented used what was called swamp cooling. Basically a giant sized humidifier to cool the air. No A/C as we know it today. Worked ok,"

I live in a desert region and my swamp (evaporative) cooler is far cheaper than refrigerated AC by a wide margin. There's around 2 weeks where the humidity is too high for it to do much, but I power through and could schlep my laptop over to the senior center which is a designated cooling center in town if it's too much to bear. The differential is between 25F and 30F. Today it's around 100F and the house is a comfortable 76F. About 2 weeks out of the year I need to leave the swamp cooler running 24/7 at 400W. My last house had AC that drew 4kW when it ran. I'm guessing at around a 50% duty cycle, it's been a while. Call it 2kW. I was hoping to get the swamp cooler hooked up on solar, but other expenses crept in this season and now it makes more sense to get heating projects finished for winter. I haven't run the central heating for 10 years and keep trying to do projects that get the house warmer on average during the cold season. An electric blanket is awesome at night and a heater in the bathroom gets it warm enough to make showering comfortable. The ideal might be a hobbit hole with solar tubes for lighting that stayed at a constant temp all year around. Well beyond my budget.

[DS999]

Surprised to see the Reg echoing

The pejorative "NIMBY" language I've seen in other articles about this.

If all it did was take up a square mile of former farmland in a rural area where few people would see it and it wouldn't affect their day to day lives they wouldn't care. But the construction required for this would be MASSIVE. Imagine how many cement trucks will drive over local roads to get there. Imagine the noise in what was formerly a quiet rural place to live. Then they have trucks delivering equipment and so forth, until finally the servers. I suppose once everything is set up there will be much less traffic. But how much damage will that have caused? Will they pay to have the cracked concrete roads all that heavy truck traffic caused patched up? Certainly not voluntarily, and probably with a lot of "it was like that before" claims.

They are going to have to get this water from somewhere. I can't imagine the city water system would be expected to expand and cover the demand, so they'll probably be drawing it from wells. If that causes the aquifer levels to go down and the well the city's water system uses goes dry, will they pay to have them drill a new deeper well? Will they do the same for farmers whose wells to provide water for their homes or their livestock run dry? Presumably they will have some sort of generators as backup, how noisy are those? How often will they "test" them - or will they run non stop for months/years until the grid can deliver sufficient power? How much air pollution do they create?

That's even before getting into whether expanding the grid to provide power is going to leave some/all of the burden of that expense on local ratepayers. Electricity costs have been rising steeply in certain areas of the US - mysteriously that seems concentrated in the places with the most datacenter construction. It is pretty clear that the rates they are being charged are not covering their full cost, and ordinary households are bearing the brunt of something they do not benefit from (or at least they don't benefit from them anymore than someone hundreds or thousands of miles away does) because they are not job creators. Any jobs created won't go to locals, because the locals won't have the experience to be hired for them.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Surprised to see the Reg echoing

"It is pretty clear that the rates they are being charged are not covering their full cost,"

The datacenters should be paying the full cost for the electric company to bring power to their facility. If I want to upgrade the service at my home, I will be charged for a new transformer and heavier lines from the pole provided there is adequate capacity there. If there isn't, chances are that I'd have to pay to at least cover the cost of bulking out the medium distribution lines to get to me. I could also wait until more homes are being built on my trunk and it has to be done anyway. In my case, I'm better off either adding solar or adding service to the lot next door when I can scoop it up as the power company would be required to do the necessary to add that. They'd still get me for at least $20k to add another pole since it would be too far for a drop. (not counting squeeze to get it approved)

[DS999]

Re: Surprised to see the Reg echoing

Even if the transformer was at capacity and had to be upgraded they don't charge you that specifically. Utility billing is highly regulated, they can't get away with the kind of stuff cable companies do when people want service expansion just outside the edge of their current service area and are told they'll have to pay tens of thousands of dollars up front to cover 100% of their cost not only for delivering to you but setting up the infrastructure to deliver to others around you. The cost of stuff like that is built into utility tariffs where part of your bill is such-and-such many cents per kwh for power generation, such-and-such per kwh for "delivery" (which covers line/transformers/etc) plus a fixed cost depending on meter size.

The problem is that I think they've oriented the cost sharing their standard tariffs towards the idea of maybe a business needs three phase power in a location where that's not the default so that requires some minor upgrades like a new transformer. Or a factory moves in and it'll need a few megawatts which means building a new substation in the area, or expanding an existing one. Until recently they almost never had cases where they have a single customer come in and tell them they need hundreds of megawatts, and with AI thousands of megawatts, which may require not only upgrades to many many miles of HVDC lines serving that area from multiple directions, but also the construction of new generating capacity.

For quite some time utilities have had not seen much growth in overall electric demand. Yes population growth and more economic activity create new demand, but that's been mostly balanced through energy savings initiatives that the utilities have driven themselves to avoid the expensive construction of new generating capacity. When I owned a sports bar/restaurant in the area they paid pretty much my full cost of replacing all fluorescent tube and halogen lighting and much of the incandescent lighting (except where it was necessary at least at the time for mood/aesthetics) with LED. It helped that I rewired all the fluorescent fixtures myself so their rebates could go 100% toward the LED bulbs.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Surprised to see the Reg echoing

"Even if the transformer was at capacity and had to be upgraded they don't charge you that specifically."

They can where I am as my home already has provisioning based on its size. Perhaps if the city banned the use of propane for regular cooking and heating, they could also require the power company to upsize me at no charge. Local regs will vary quite a bit. It still doesn't mean I won't be asked for a cash expeditng fee from the supervisor that would have to sign off and schedule the upgrade.

[DS999]

Re: Surprised to see the Reg echoing

Are they charging you based on the size/capacity of a replacement meter on the outside of your house or the neighborhood transformer's capacity? The former is the deal nearly everywhere, but I haven't heard of the latter. Though I suppose different states have different utility regulatory bodies and won't always end up with the same rate structures.

I have to imagine that in most situations the transformer has unused capacity, since a transformer in a given location will be connected to differing numbers of houses, that have different meter capacities. They won't have two dozen transformer types so they always use just enough at any location leaving no slack capacity. So unless it is more than just you have upgraded service it seems unlikely the transformer would require an upgrade. I suppose if a bunch of people on a street all upgraded their service from 200A to 400A because they got an EV and switched from gas furnace to heat pump that could push a transformer that had plenty of slack a few years ago to its limit.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Surprised to see the Reg echoing

"I suppose if a bunch of people on a street all upgraded their service from 200A to 400A because they got an EV and switched from gas furnace to heat pump that could push a transformer that had plenty of slack a few years ago to its limit."

The swap from a gas furnace to a heat pump shouldn't be a big deal and an EV would soak up around 30A mostly at night when demand from other things is at a low. There are even some smart panels that will balance the loads dynamically so the EV would stop charging if an electric hob was turned on based on a hierarchy of priorities. 200A is a lot of power for an average home. My place is 1,300 sqft and has a 100A service. According to the reports I get from the electric company, I'm the most, or one of the most economical users in my area. If I turned on all of the lights in the house, I'd be amazed if it were as much as 200W (without the big yard light that I rarely use). Lighting up the garage is 250W to have a bright work level of lighting. Most of the time when I'm in there I only use one 50W bank of lights. My house heating during the day is 50W to run the small fans which is much less than the fan draw for the central heating I don't use anymore. The point is that the few things that would draw a lot could be tamed through turning other things off. An electric range draws a lot, but not often for long periods of time, so if the EV charging was stopped during that time, no big deal. An EV would be charging much later anyway to take advantage of off-peak rates. Can't really do that for cooking unless taking a nap when getting home and waking up to make dinner in the wee hours.

A bunch of people in my neighborhood have rooftop solar. We get so many clear days that it's an easy call. Doesn't help at night, obviously, unless those people have battery backup.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Surprised to see the Reg echoing

"population growth and more economic activity create new demand, but that's been mostly balanced through energy savings initiatives that the utilities have driven themselves to avoid the expensive construction of new generating capacity."

Depending on the area, that might just kick the can down the road or slow the urgency/pace of upgrading the infrastructure. The city I'm in has more and more owned homes having solar panels fitted. It's in the desert so we get lots of shine and need a fair amount of HVAC in summer and winter. That's been tempered by heat pumps, but they aren't as prevalent in the US as they are in Europe, go figure. I plan on adding a solar powered heat pump to the garage/shop if the new swamp cooler (once installed) doesn't do the trick. Today is too bloody hot to do anything in the garage and I have a stack of projects on the list.

As far as generation goes, there's loads of solar fields going in around me, but I'm not sure if any of that feeds the local area since the transmission corridor passed all of it's legal wrangling so power could be sent to the big city 100 miles away. Another run of heavy AC and DC transmission lines have gone up. I'd really like to generate most of what I need at my home rather than pay The Man.

[Nate Amsden]

should be requirements

Data centers like this must use closed loop non evaporative cooling systems(less water), providing their own clean energy(doesn't have to be on site but must be on the same grid), and no tax breaks.

They probably won't be interested in that. So let them build elsewhere. But if they are still interested I suspect people will be open to it.

Fortunately more and more agree people don't want to subsidize big tech AI crap(certainly at the dcale the likes of openAI want). They can pay the real costs then charge customers accordingly.

Hopefully the bubble will burst soon and this won't even be much of an issue.

[ComicalEngineer]

Re: should be requirements

Unfortunately non-evaporative cooling systems are just not as efficient at getting rid of the surplus heat. The heat transfer coefficient of water in a pipe to air is about 10-15% that of evaporative cooling and would require massive fin tube heat exchangers with large fans to blow air across the cooling tubes.

Thus the bit barns not only suck up megawatts of power but then that energy has to be gotten rid of. One kg of water takes about 2250 kJ to evaporate it. Thus, for every MegaWatt of energy about 1500 kg of water will need to be evaporated per hour. A 900MW heat output will need about 1,350,000 kg of water per hour or 1,350 m3. A typical Olympic size swimming pool is about 2,500m3 hence a 900MW bitfarm will use an Olympic size swimming pool of water every two hours.

The average UK person uses about 40 litres of water per day hence 24 hours of 90MW bitfarm operation uses enough water for just over 800,000 people.

Hardly surprising that people are getting upset especially in areas where power and water are scarce.

* Approximate figures only

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: should be requirements

Thanks for doing the math, that makes a lot more sense now it’s written down.

Makes you wonder why they want to keep building them

In Arizona and not Alaska. Can’t just be latency.

[gnasher729]

Re: should be requirements

Just change the regulations so they can use 40l of water per person who is employed there and gets paid.

[retiredFool]

Re: should be requirements

Just to expound on what you said a bit, it takes 1 cal to raise 1 g of water 1 degree C. But it takes 540 cal to transition that 1 g of water to steam. Interestingly going to solid phase to liquid is only 80. Its no wonder the bit barns evap it instead of fins with air/air cooling.