cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/michigan/p/403803/a-small-town-is-fighting-a-1-2-billion-ai-datacenter-for-america-s-nuclear-weapon
Ypsilanti, Michigan has officially decided to fight against the construction of a ‘high-performance computing facility’ that would service a nuclear weapons laboratory 1,500 miles away.
Good for them, meanwhile in Tulsa they are building 27 of these with little push back, almost no active ones I can see.
Fucking things should be fired bombed.
You know they’re just buildings full of servers, right?
I mean, I’d rather have a data center than some toxic chemical factory or a busy warehouse in my neighborhood. Data centers just… sit there. They use a lot of power and some use a lot of water, but if your region doesn’t have power/water problems it’s not really much of an impact.
A nation’s supercomputing power used to be something people celebrated. Especially one owned and operated by a place like Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Local residents in cities with data centers are dealing with higher electricity costs. Those costs get passed on from the corps to the local residents. On top of that they’re dealing with water scarcity and pollution.
Go look at places these things operate they don’t just sit there. The noise alone is in the ranges that requires hearing protection. And if you live near one you will loose all your water. Then add the lights. These places cause physical harm to people living near them.
Take a long, hard look at the impact. Higher utility bills for everyone. Massive light noise. Noise, incessant noise. Water pressure issues.
Since this will be a facility owned by a public university, I think the city would see no property tax revenue from this project. So why should a city trade its health and/or morals for a nuclear weapons datacenter and not even get anything out of it?
Ypsi is in the Ann Arbor zone. This is otherwise decent real estate. A data center would tank that. I hope the data center loses, but we’ve seen many a city council sell out their constituents for these leviathans.
It’s mostly another NIMBY neighborhood getting their knickers in a twist because the facility will be used for nuclear research. That’s the main point they’re taking exception to.
The moment we use the NIMBY label we prejudice ourselves against potentially legitimate local and global concerns and specific local protest movements. I do that too on some issues but do wonder sometimes whether I’m being unfair. I guess the determining factors would be how big a sacrifice a local community is asked to make, how great the greater good that sacrifice will serve, also who is protesting and what arguments they bring forth, what values they stand for, how these values align with yours, etc.
