Posted on 07/17/2026 7:55:38 AM PDT by Miami Rebel
The potential spread of massive water and electricity-consuming data centers into Florida has sparked fierce opposition from thousands of residents and drawn dividing lines between its most powerful politicians.
But, experts say, the projects popping up in Miami-Dade are unlike those that grab headlines for fouling drinking water and driving up power bills — for now. The best example yet of Florida’s pushback against the spread of data centers may have been Thursday’s Palm Beach County Commission meeting, where officials gave a firm no to a proposed project called “Project Tango” that would have placed a data center using as much electricity as the city of Tallahassee right next to the Everglades.
Project Tango is now the fifth large data center project stopped by Floridians, including Sentinel Grove in St. Lucie, Silver Fox in Martin County, Deltona in Citrus County and Okee-One in Okeechobee.
Several counties have also issued moratoriums for data centers — Leon County, Nassau County, Pasco County, Sarasota County, Citrus County and Jackson County. In Citrus County, where a small town was slated to play host to Florida’s first hyperscale data center, opponents of the project packed the commission and exceeded its overflow room, the Tampa Bay Times reported. The project was canceled.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
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I think resistance will strengthen between now and 2028 and rise to the level of a factor in the presidential primaries and election.
The anti-tech and anti-tech oligarch themes have tremendous populist resonance.
Our country is going to pot. It seems like both sides don’t mind that China is going to slaughter us with AI. I wouldn’t care except it could affect all of us. It’s sad that idiots are in charge on both sides.
This article is about small data centers not being so controversial (less power demand, water demand, less noise). An argument could also be made that a small data center is also less investment risk: if the AI demand is just hype you didn't lose as much building a small data center.
The massive power requirements of data centers should make us wonder what all of those transistors are doing. It’s some sort of exercise in brute force.
Power consumption should be less of a concern than how the zillions of computations are affecting us.
Miami Rebel wrote: “Data centers are becoming a political hot potato sweeping the nation, and it’s not just red vs. blue or rural vs. urban.”
No, it’s really China vs. US. Most of the opposition is misinformation. This article is full of it. Energy costs are reduced by data centers and water usage is overstated.
No sensationalism there. Data centers are not an issue if there is proper planning for them. Its just like any other development. If you have a township or county planning commission that is in bed with the developer and allows massive development without requiring the developer to pay for additional infrastructure or putting it in place before the development comes "online," then the community will suffer. It happens with residential development all the time. Housing or apartments are build with no expansion of road networks and the roads become clogged and rush hour becomes a nightmare. Or the township allows a shopping mall without adequate additional roads and traffic becomes a nightmare. Or out West (especially in Colorado), residential communities are built that suck up water without adequate planning and the other residents suffer. Usually the planning commissioners are in bed with the developers and it all flies under the radar. But if proper planning occurs, you can have a data center that brings in millions of tax dollars and defrays residential taxes and provides money for all kinds of projects without reduction in residential utility availability.
You’re correct about the costs. My main point is that data centers are not necessary for you and me to get around on the web. They will be used to store information that can be used for marketing. That information will be quite valuable. I know from my work experience that demographic data is expensive.
Now next question: where will the data come from? If it's about mining social media data, that data is already stored somewhere (i.e. the servers of Facebook, TikTok, etc.). The same with CCTV data, tax data, etc.
So my question, similar to your sentiment, is why the need to build so many large mega data centers if the data is already effectively stored somewhere? With a career in back-end data processing, what little data analysis I've done has sometimes had preliminary results stored in temporary tables (thus the need for new storage) to keep from having to repeatedly mine old data to retrieve relevant data for new analyses. But IMHO the many large data centers seem to exceed that.
Why not just build them in a foreign country like they do with the rest of the US industry?
I don’t understand what’s going on with data centers.
We’ve been hearing a lot about data centers, and about community opposition to them, because they supposedly use so much power and water.
What I have not heard about, is what is the need or function of the data centers. The internet as we know it has been around for decades, and has functioned without all of these data centers.
I’m sure I’ve missed something. But wondered, why the talk of data centers springing up, and why is there a need for them? What functions are they supposed to serve, that are not already being done with how the internet functions now?
But AI has not been around for decades. And the use of AI has not peaked; it is just getting started - for business, health care, the military.
Others have said it, I repeat it: I'm not against guns. I am against the misuse of guns.
I am not against data centers. I am against Satan misusing data centers. Just like the printing press was used to publish Bibles, the printing press was used to publish Playboy Magazines.
Society is going to have to sort through regulatory controls. I hope regulators do not prevent our military from being able to knock down with a 100 percent success rate 10,000 hypersonic missiles headed our way - all at the same time.
You are misreading the opposition to this massive data center build-out. The people I know who are most opposed to it are actually some of the most knowledgeable people in the field, including former top scientists, programmers, and technicians. Beyond that, plenty of regular people are getting hit by the side effects. Regional electricity and water rates are climbing, and the run on silicon wafer production has sent memory and hardware prices through the roof. The pushback isn't uneducated; it is coming from people who either understand the tech or are paying the bill for it.
I CAN KEEP MY PHOTOS IN SCRAPBOOKS & NEVER HAVE TO PAY “THE CLOUD” TO ACCESS THEM
True. The panickans want us to believe these centers are sucking in water and wasting it somehow.
In truth they use a closed-loop cooling system that recirculates water, not a constant drain on the water supply.
I’m not suggesting that opposition is limited to the rubes, but the fact is that it is yet another issue for which the middle and working classes feel that they’re bearing the costs while the wealthiest reap the benefits.
That is the main fuel of populist resentment toward the elites.
“In truth they use a closed-loop cooling system that recirculates water, not a constant drain on the water supply.”
That’s what I would guess. I wonder about these stories saying otherwise. Are they just Luddite misinformation?
Stopping hypersonic missiles is a matter of localized military hardware and physics. It has absolutely nothing to do with the massive commercial data centers being built across the country.
The national defense argument is a smokescreen to hide what these facilities are actually doing: acting as the backbone for mass digital surveillance. These server farms exist to harvest, store, and analyze the intimate details of our daily lives—our locations, spending habits, search histories, and private communications. Tech companies and government agencies use this infrastructure to keep tabs on every single one of us. Wrapping these data centers in the American flag is just a cheap way to justify draining local water tables and driving up electricity bills for the sake of a massive surveillance state.”
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