Data Center NIMBY

A Gallup survey suggests 71 percent of Americans do not want a data center built where they live.

That “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) pattern occurs all the time, concerning landfills, homeless shelters, prisons, mental health facilities, wind turbines, airports, and cell phone towers, for example.

The dynamic reoccurs because of a “mismatch” between benefits and costs. When a policy’s benefits are broad and diffuse but its costs are concentrated, the people who bear the costs have the strongest incentive to organize, while the beneficiaries are often too scattered to mobilize. 

That asymmetry helps explain why many useful policies and facilities trigger intense local resistance even when they are socially valuable overall.

In part, that is because the small number of recipients of the concentrated costs can mobilize easily. The perhaps millions of citizens who benefit are very hard to organize. 

Politically, this is known as a “collective action” problem. The dispersed beneficiaries each have only a small personal stake, while the concentrated losers have a large one, so they show up at hearings, file lawsuits, and pressure officials far more effectively than the hard-to-organize majority. 

So high-performance data centers are not “just” about technology: they also are about politics.

Data-center builders will need to engage in politics to get their projects built.