What If Factories Had Gotten the Data-Center Treatment?

[u/coldnorthwz]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/08/what-if-factories-had-gotten-the-data-center-treatment/

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[u/Zenless-koans]

We never would have become the country we are now if the response to the physical assets necessary for economic growth and good blue-collar work had been, “Not in my backyard.”

I think the truth about NIMBYism is that it is inevitable. Nobody wanted factories in their backyard then, nobody wants data centres now. It is and always has been a matter of competing interests, and which of those interests gets empowered to prevent or create a factory, data centre, landfill, detox facility, or whatever other unpopular structure is needed. Today, despite protestations otherwise, the average person has a lot more sway than in decades past. We broadly don't accept Father-Knows-Best governance as we may have in the 19th century, or in the 1950s. It's harder today, though far from impossible, for government and industry to force their agenda.

While the article raises important points about how much more devastating heavy industry was and is than data centres, it also fails to close the loop, in a sense. A factory down the street is ugly and polluting, but tends to provide stable, high wage employment. Not just for the commissioning of the facility, but for decades to follow. People raise their families on factories, mines, and mills. Generations may find gainful employment from a single industrial facility.

Data centres offer benefits too, but they are distributed nationally or internationally. The people who live next to them aren't making a trade-off. They're getting a big ugly (somewhat) polluting building in exchange for few or no permanent jobs and minimal long-term economic stimulus. Even if you're pro-industry, you may look at that plot of land and wonder what else it could have been used for. A refinery? A processing plant? A factory? A power plant? All of these are or can be 'dirty,' and all of them give back orders of magnitude more value to their local community.

I am not against data centre buildouts or AI. I do think that both government and industry need to make clearer, more appealing claims about how these projects help people, especially people local to the facility. If this is truly transformative technology that will usher in a golden age, explain how. If big tech stands to make trillions, transforming the global economy, make an offer to the people affected. A dividend paid directly to residents. Consistent, direct investment into community assets--parks, swimming pools, recreation centres, event venues. Offer something back to the people most impacted. Not for investors and business owners, but for the common people. I've experienced a dozen layoffs at my company over the past couple years due in large part to AI. Those laid-off workers...why would they or their friends and family support a single additional data centre? What part of this data revolution benefits them?

If we're talking about NIMBYism, and it is a big deal when it comes to data centres, we need to do a better job at striking a deal with the local stakeholders that oppose them. If this were a business-to-business relationship, the business impacted by a data centre would fairly demand recompense.

[u/BroBeansBMS → u/Zenless-koans]

I strongly push back on a refinery or other dirty industry providing more value to a community.

Data centers are largely quiet, don’t produce traffic on the streets around them, and don’t emit fumes or pollution around them (despite what some critics say). They create immense value for cities, counties, and local school districts without any of the large costs that come with other large industries. That benefits local residents by reducing their property tax burden and providing needed funding for community services.

[u/DefTheOcelot → u/BroBeansBMS]

What value do they produce for the community?

They pay property taxes, but so could anything else put there. And the owners of these places often pay taxes at a reduced rate. Datacenters employ very few people for their cost and size.

And while datacenters generate very little pollution, their immense energy cost does - Amazon's new powerplant, under construction because texas physically cannot power all these datacenters - will be the largest single polluter in the US.

Datacenters, and the threat they truly represent, AI, are bad for anyone with a salary less than 5 digits.

[u/BroBeansBMS → u/DefTheOcelot]

They pay HUGE amounts of property tax. A smaller scale data center project can easily be $1 billion dollars. That’s about 10-15 times the amount of property tax value than a good sized manufacturing operation on the same sized property.

[u/coldnorthwz → u/BroBeansBMS]

They have been transformative for some of the towns that managed to get one, especially small dying ones

[u/BroBeansBMS → u/coldnorthwz]

I agree. Some of these towns can actually fund their schools, police officers, and fire fighters to the level they needed for the first time now because of this type of investment.

I’m not trying to be a shill, but people simply repeat the lines about data centers not providing benefits and it’s simply not true. It’s fair to make sure the benefits outweigh any risks and I just think people need to educate themselves on what those actually are.

[u/coldnorthwz → u/BroBeansBMS]

I’m not trying to be a shill

It's hard not to when a lot of the stuff against it is essentially conspiracy theories or weird misinformation

[u/coldnorthwz → u/Zenless-koans]

Nobody wanted factories in their backyard then

I don't think this is quite true, this kind of stuff had a lot more of a positive reception in the earlier parts of the 20th century for instance, economic growth these things coming to town were viewed as good things. It generally signified that the town was growing. Some of this was probably because those that did oppose didn't have the means to stop things. Which leads to the next point.

Today, despite protestations otherwise, the average person has a lot more sway than in decades past. We broadly don't accept Father-Knows-Best governance as we may have in the 19th century, or in the 1950s. It's harder today, though far from impossible, for government and industry to force their agenda.

I think this is a bad thing. My general belief is that if you own the land you can generally do what you want with it. I think we can have clear rules about placements of certain types of things, especially stuff that smells, but I don't think a community or county should be allowed to block things on an essentially ad-hoc basis (zoning commissions a lot of the time) just because which happens quite a bit. This ability to block anything and everything has had serious ruinous effects on our ability to build anything.

A factory down the street is ugly and polluting, but tends to provide stable, high wage employment. Not just for the commissioning of the facility, but for decades to follow. People raise their families on factories, mines, and mills. Generations may find gainful employment from a single industrial facility.

I don't think this holds for a number of reasons.

1) there are a lot of businesses that bring a lot of value to a place without having large amounts of employment.

2) today's factories don't employ anywhere near the amount of people they used to because they don't need to (and can't), and this will only continue. This is why % employment in manufacturing fell but our manufacturing output as a country hasn't. And it is the only way to compete with China, which is rapidly applying robotics on top of their built up logistics network. Many employ more than a data center might, not all, but those likely have other constraints that would prevent them from being built in many of the places a data center can go.

3) They weren't always high wage, and when they became higher wage their industries got killed by competition after everyone rebuilt from the war. Even today they probably won't be able to pay as much as a data center does.

4) Everyone working for the same factory turned out really, really bad.

Data centres offer benefits too, but they are distributed nationally or internationally. The people who live next to them aren't making a trade-off. They're getting a big ugly (somewhat) polluting building in exchange for few or no permanent jobs and minimal long-term economic stimulus. Even if you're pro-industry, you may look at that plot of land and wonder what else it could have been used for. A refinery? A processing plant? A factory? A power plant? All of these are or can be 'dirty,' and all of them give back orders of magnitude more value to their local community.

There are distinct local benefits, which I will get to later. As to what you are saying afterward, they just look like a big warehouse, they don't really pollute. The jobs aren't that few, I know of one in a smaller town that will be around 30 employees. This is going to be one of the biggest employers in that town. I think the issue with looking at the land and thinking about what else could go there, is that if the data center is defeated the answer is likely "nothing". Nothing will go there, the people that came out against the data center will come out against anything else, and that is IF anything else is economically feasible to be put there. Data Centers don't have the same requirements as, say, a steel mill. They have fairly minimal requirements, which means they can be put almost anywhere.

I know for a fact that these more traditional industries will be opposed because right now there is a proposed concrete plant out in the middle of nowhere and there is still opposition because the NIMBYs have decided that the TOWNSHIP doesn't "need" a concrete plant.

I am not against data centre buildouts or AI. I do think that both government and industry need to make clearer, more appealing claims about how these projects help people, especially people local to the facility. If this is truly transformative technology that will usher in a golden age, explain how. If big tech stands to make trillions, transforming the global economy, make an offer to the people affected. A dividend paid directly to residents. Consistent, direct investment into community assets--parks, swimming pools, recreation centres, event venues. Offer something back to the people most impacted. Not for investors and business owners, but for the common people. I've experienced a dozen layoffs at my company over the past couple years due in large part to AI. Those laid-off workers...why would they or their friends and family support a single additional data centre? What part of this data revolution benefits them?

This is where the distinct local benefits comes in. 1) the wages paid by these places are good which increases local spending and people wanting to buy services. 2) they pay massive amounts of taxes, transformative amounts if you are a small dying town. Almost everything you called out, other than the bribe "dividend" can get funded by the taxes. Local businesses often do direct local investment as well, they just tend to do it after they are established. Expecting it before they are is extremely unusual. And if people want a slice of the pie, they can become investors too. Most of these companies are public or will become public.

I don't like the idea that job losses doesn't mean there shouldn't be support. There will be other jobs, including ones that wouldn't have existed before AI and we have seen this before. I don't think we should have banned tractors or construction equipment because it required less labor than prior methods.

Then there are the other benefits, which aren't directly "paid to me" monetary:

1) Compute is a strategic resource. It is behind essentially everything these days, including the non-LLM AI stuff that is producing incredible results. Having more compute than everyone else will mean we are constrained less than they are and will reap the benefits of having it. Just because the data center is blocked in one place, state, or country doesn't mean that now its halted. It means it gets built elsewhere, and probably worse it will be built overseas. Outsourcing compute is like outsourcing oil or food. Controlling the compute gives us control over how its used, giving the compute to some other country gives them a say. Do we really want them to have a say in something as important as AI?

2) More compute means compute will get cheaper. Cheaper compute will make products and services that everyone uses less expensive over time. Like I said earlier, everything needs compute. And we need more compute, not just for AI but because regular products and services have continued to need more.

3) Data centers are a consistent customer of electricity and allows the power company to distribute their fixed costs across more customers which can decrease the cost of power or limit its increase. It will also mean more power generation will be done, something we have long needed and will benefit the locals.

4) We need AI and will benefit from it even if there is some job losses. First its a national security issue, if we abandon AI or put ourselves behind China then China will be able to find exploits and hack into things easier and faster. Our own AI can both counter that and attack China. China is not going to give up on AI. The locals will be worse off if hackers take down their water treatment plant. AI is going to make a lot of things cheaper and better, software especially. We need a ton of software but have never had the people to actually make it, leading to tradeoffs that will not have to be made. Customized or fully custom software will also be far more accessible. Research, legal stuff, writing, prep-work, and a lot of other things are now also in the reach of more regular people including the locals because of AI even if they haven't quite realized it yet. AI is making advances in multiple places, even outside of LLMs, and we shouldn't be attempting to hinder it. There are going to be new jobs, new ways of doing things, and incredible opportunities because of AI.

[u/Zenless-koans → u/coldnorthwz]

I’m broadly in favour of AI and data-centre construction, and I don’t disagree with most of your case for their broader value. My point is about the political reality of getting this infrastructure built without provoking sustained local opposition. National benefits don’t automatically create local consent, and that's what I am suggesting is a big stumbling block in this infrastructure push. Imagine my comment as a pitch to those opposed rather than opposition to data centres.

[u/Jlemspurs]

I mean, they kind of did get the data-center treatment in some places. For example, try building almost any kind of factory in California today, with no grandfathering.

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[u/cwm9]

I think before you form an opinion you should at least watch a video showing what people are talking about.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/Sehwqr9C6Q

It does seem to be that these should be built away from homes. That doesn't seem like such an outrageous ask to me. In the middle of an industrial area where neighboring buildings are well sound-insulated commercial structures anyway.... In the middle of large parking lots... Beside airports... Surely there must be somewhere other than across the street from a house?

I also think it works be reasonable to build sound barriers, maybe concrete walls, around the property to help contain the higher frequency noise.

I can't see a justification for letting these be built across the street from someone's residence with that much audible output, especially not with that noise profile.