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'America hates data centers,' new database reveals more than 90% of 10,000 public comments are negative
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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The amount of data center the average person needs can fit in a shoebox. Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever. We don’t need gigantic warehouses.
I'm not trusting the average person to not let it turn into a botnet.
You're not wrong, but those already exist and are less bad for society than data centers.
To be fair, I trust the average person more than I trust the people currently building data centres.
People already have phones that can get turned into botnets so I don’t think it’s a new problem.
Hell, just have them host services on the phone with peer to peer networking.
Also, I want most of the services they want to move to the cloud to still work when the net is down.
I may want to use a computer to watch my media library or play a game that I already own with out an active internet connection and ID card. Or, just use a word processor or tax program, or image editor.
Sorry, please provide your ID to log in to the cloud to do basic daily tasks, citizens. This is for your own good, trust us.
A couple weeks ago my internet went out and it was great that my Plex server still worked on my local network.
It's been a heavy rainy season here, lots of wind, power and net issues.
Meanwhile, the LAN works on a UPS, solar, and no Internet.
(Sure is nice being able to put on a movie or music playlist, and work on documents, or sort though old vacationphotos when it's a rainy day with out a cloud failure blocking it.)
We were out after the hurricane last month and it wasn't until two weeks later that I realized we could have all been watching movies off my generator. 🙄 Oh well. I did have 5 houses running refrigerators and chargers off that crappy genny, so there's that.
I think you've vastly underestimated how much digital media people consume...
But setting that aside, there are real efficiency wins from scale. I am a self-hoster, I have a fleet of machines I manage with Nix, I run local LLMs and do real work on consumer gaming hardware, i'm a huge fan of federated and distributed peer systems. I am 100% for that. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. And I'm saying we also need the gigantic warehouses. Absolutely.
The issue is zoning and environmental concerns and the effect on communities and strain on public infrastructure. All issues worsened by the AI boom and incentivized by capitalism.
There's a way to do datacenters right and its been done before. You just need legislation and enforcement. The problem isn't datacenters: the problem is that the same people putting up datacenters are the same people who own your politicians
The average person, but not the average (non AI) business.
There's no way I could take our R7725s with dual 300 watt threadrippers and fit that in a shoe box. And we're a small company.
Yeah, but even then it’s going from a shoebox to a closet.
A closet with some pretty hefty air conditioning. We tried a closet and that won't cut it.
Plus what's a datacenter but one big airconditioned closet?
Auditable access control and security, private connectivity to vendors and partners, advanced fire prevention, a formalised process for access for vendor support, delivery docks for full rack unit appliances, separate circuits for power, space for cable runs, 24/7 concierge.
Rolling your own datacentre is ludicrously expensive when you can just rent half a rack of space, this would kill small businesses and major corps would just take the hit and pass it on to consumers.
They usually have raised tiled floors where you can lift a tile and duck under to do some cabling.
It’s a big closet you need to build a new building for, hurting animals I like a lot more than people.
What if we put the closets in empty offices and let people work from home?
We already did that and the early internet was wildly power inefficient and unreliable. I'd rather have a million websites in one DC than a million server closets splattered all over the planet.
This post brought to you by this DC:
The power efficiency ran us afoul of the Jevons paradox, and more distributed outages is better than fewer universal outages.
Everyone hosting their services on their own hardware is the web infrastructure equivalent of getting everyone to smelt pig iron in their backyards. Some amount of datacentres are necessary for the functioning of a modern internet.
The problems we're seeing at the moment are a result of artificially inflated demand driven by AI bullshit disrupting supply lines of hardware that could actually be useful to people, the lack of environmental planning, and the condescending refusal by datacentre builders to engage with the reasons communities are opposed to their projects.
Sure, we could do that. But we'd need even more computer hardware that we don't have, so it would be more expensive, and energy use would be less efficient so there'd be even more environmental impact. Just spread around to every house rather than in one centralized easily-protested spot.
Sam Altman was incredibly tone deaf and it was a stupid thing for him to say out loud when he said RAM was better off in data centers, but in some significant and important ways he was right. Computer equipment is much more efficiently utilized when it's in a data center.
I say this as someone who's super into running local models myself. I do it because I believe the autonomy and privacy are worth trading off the extra cost in hardware and electricity. If I just wanted to use AI to get something done and didn't care about that I'd be paying for API access instead.
And of course lemmy finds this take to be controversial. 🙄 Just commented that we already did the millions of server closets thing and it was an inefficient, unreliable mess. Any purists here need to punch out now, you're using a Cloudflare DC to read this.
We should improve society somewhat.
Not that I disagree with you, but what are you referring to by the millions of server closets thing?
Every website and corporate IT infra was run out of a local closet, or a mini data center in some cases. The cloud consolidated all that and is more energy efficient, secure (according to user setup!) and reliable. Going back to everyone doing their own thing would be awful, but given AWS pricing, I'm not sure why small corporations aren't already moving back inhouse.
We might be talking about different eras, but they were run out of dedicated racks in datacentres for an extremely long time before the cloud. There are entire industries that would no longer be financially viable if they were stuck with their little comms closets.