Popular Stanford AI professor says Americans are not happy about data centers: 'These are human beings'

Oh, what a shock — the tech industry has discovered that 'human beings' don't particularly enjoy having their towns bulldozed for server farms with all the charm of a Soviet boiler house. Stanford professor Anjney Midha, bless him, has pointed out that NIMBY-ism around data centers is driven by 'a total lack of transparency' about what these things actually do, how much water they drink, and whose electricity bill gets hiked. Groundbreaking. Next he'll tell us people don't like living next to nuclear waste dumps.

Midha is hardly breaking news: communities from Virginia to Arizona have been organising against these power-sucking monoliths for years, but only now that a Stanford professor says it on tape does the industry pretend to care. The real joke is that the same companies that refuse to disclose their energy use or water consumption are also the ones pushing 'AI for good' brochures. If they were transparent, they'd have to admit that each ChatGPT query costs a bottle of water and a lump of coal.

But sure, let's have yet another 'listening tour' and some PR-studded town halls. By the time Silicon Valley admits that data centers are noisy, thirsty, ugly neighbours, the locals will have rewritten zoning laws to require a dozen environmental impact statements per megawatt. The irony is almost too rich: the industry that wants to simulate every conversation in the galaxy cannot be bothered to have an honest one with the people living next door.