Nobody Wants to Live Next to the Cloud

Two years ago, if you were a governor or a mayor, an AI data centre was a gift. Billions in investment, a photo opportunity with a tech executive, a press release about jobs. Now it is the thing most likely to get you shouted at in a village hall.

New York has just become the first US state to put a temporary pause on any new hyperscale facilities, and the only surprising this is that this has taken so long.

Kathy Hochul's executive order pauses state environmental permits for new data centres drawing 50 megawatts or more, for up to a year, while New York works out what its rules should actually be. Her stated reason is that these huge data centres threaten to push up utility bills and drain natural resources, and average residential electricity prices in the state have climbed by roughly two-thirds since 2019.

The critics say this is cowardice dressed as caution — that New York already lost tens of thousands of jobs and a fortune in investment by banning fracking, watched it all cross the border into Pennsylvania, and is now merrily doing the same thing again. There is something in that. But the more revealing detail is that around 240 local US governments had already imposed their own moratoriums before the state got involved.

The one thing everyone agrees on

Eco-activists object to the water and the carbon. Farmers object to the land. Suburban parents object to the noise and the view. Populists object to their electricity bill and to the AI companies themselves. Polling has found something like seven in ten Americans don't want one built near them.

For a Democratic party that has spent a decade hunting for an anti-establishment cause that doesn't split its own coalition, this is close to miraculous — a fight against enormous, unloved corporations that unites people who agree on nothing else. Expect it everywhere in the midterms.

And Britain is not watching from a safe distance

We are running the same experiment with more enthusiasm and less honesty. The government has designated AI Growth Zones, promised to treat data centres as critical national infrastructure, and floated small modular reactors to power them. Meanwhile the Local Government Association has warned Parliament that councils can't reliably measure the environmental impact of these things, that local electricity and water systems are already under strain, and that the American and Irish experience shows exactly where uncoordinated expansion ends up.

Two-thirds of Britain's existing data centres sit within twenty miles of London. Housing developments in west London have been stalled because bit barns took the spare grid capacity first. And we are proposing to expand this on a strained grid, in a country where north London and Hertfordshire may effectively run out of water by 2035, while telling households their bills are high for unrelated reasons.

Final thoughts

The interesting bit isn't NIMBYism. It's the discovery of a genuinely material grievance in an era where politics is mostly conducted over symbols. Nobody has to be persuaded to care about their electricity bill.

Data centres do have to go somewhere, and pretending otherwise is childish. But the industry's assumption — that communities would absorb the costs quietly in exchange for a plaque and forty permanent jobs — has now been comprehensively tested. It failed. Britain's ministers should probably notice before the village halls do.