Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says data center builders have to be ‘good neighbors’

Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang says that for data center builders to win over communities, they must first partner with them and be good neighbors.

“When you go into a community … before you start building, you ought to extend yourself out to the local community and partner with them,” Huang told Deirdre Bosa during the company’s GTC event in Berlin.

“Let them know what you’re about to do is going to bring, of course, all the benefits, but it’s going to, of course, bring new neighbors.”

Data center construction has faced major pushback across the US, with some counties and towns instituting outright bans on the facilities. New York has placed a one-year, statewide moratorium on data center construction. Texas, meanwhile, has put connecting new data centers to its grid on hold as it works to determine their potential impact.

The issue has even become a flash point in the midterm elections, with President Trump backing data center development, and Democrats and some Republicans campaigning against them.

Residents have lodged complaints about the constraint noise generated by data centers, water usage, increased electricity costs, and more.

To help ease tensions with local residents, some companies, including Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN), have taken steps to win over municipalities by dropping controversial…