Can data centers ever be "good neighbors"?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Megan McCarty Carino (1:05)

Can data centers ever be good neighbors? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Further proof in case you need it, AI data centers aren't very popular. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows 60% of Americans aren't comfortable welcoming one to the neighborhood. And concerns have grown since the beginning of the year across every demographic group, making the backlash a key issue in the midterm elections. Scott Brennen is the director of NYU Center on Technology Policy, which just published a report on how data centers could better work with communities.

Scott Brennen (1:55)

The proposed, purported benefits of data center construction are all mostly collective goods. Better innovation, better global competitiveness for the US.

But all of the harms are localized in specific communities. Higher energy costs like on your energy bills, environmental harm in your communities, noise pollution from the data center down the street, lower property values. So the report tries to think through what could data centers do in local communities to offer some real tangible benefit, not just minimize the harms, but how could they be sort of positive additions to communities?

Megan McCarty Carino (2:38)

All right. So what can data centers do to be good neighbors?

Scott Brennen (2:43)

Well, I mean, I think there's an opportunity for data centers to use their new demand into a grid to push for the development of renewable or less polluting energy sources, you know, paying the taxes, but also it's things like direct payments into communities, whether in the form of environmental mitigation funds or workforce development funds, maybe they're administered by a third-party nonprofit in a community. So, town centers need to do a better job of rethinking their role and think more about just how can they actually benefit the communities where they're located.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:23)

Are there any examples of projects that have, you know, leaned in to some of these recommendations, whether they read your report or not, you know, maybe did it on their own, but are there positive examples of this happening?

Scott Brennen (3:35)

There are. We are seeing increasing interest in like community benefit agreements. Certainly some of the developers will say that they're doing a lot of this sort of thing. Yeah, we don't have a lot of good sort of evaluation data of that, but yeah, and there have been interesting stories coming out of places in Virginia, places in Louisiana, where income money from data centers is, you know, lowering property taxes for residents, is supporting schools. I think there was a county or district in Louisiana that offered one-time cash payments to teachers, which is great, right, to, you know, based on the money that they're bringing in from data centers, and we've seen some interest in environmental remediation. You know, this is part of a larger sort of conversation, but like we've seen data centers, some of them move to bring their own generation capacity, and there could be some benefits there about helping the grid be more robust, more stable.

That one's a bit more of a mixed bag, right? Like if the generation capacity that they're bringing in is natural gas turbines, there's aren't, I mean, like that's better than coal, I guess, but, you know, it's still polluting, they're also really loud. So, you know, the truth is in all of these, you know, really all these questions, it's always a balancing of trade-offs.

Megan McCarty Carino (5:00)

Yeah, I wonder if at this point, you know, addressing some of these practical concerns is enough or whether data centers have turned into kind of a symbolic avatar for concerns about the technology, about these companies in general, distrust, you know, even discontent about the economy and things like that, that they seem to have become this sort of avatar for all kinds of concerns that may take longer to unwind.