Anyone who has come across Jake Humphrey’s social media content will be familiar with seeing the presenter strolling around the Norfolk countryside as he speaks into the camera.

This week, the host of the High Performance Podcast took a break from his usual mix of psychobabble and Live Laugh Love-style motivational monologues to address another topic: data centers.

“This is a conversation that is going to arrive in your town, your city, or next to your village, near your children,” Humphrey warns portentously, before getting to the object of his ire; the 150MW Apex data center proposed for land outside Norwich.

Like many people who live in the area, Humphrey is not a fan of this plan, and spends a couple of minutes rallying against it, as well as warning about the perils of the data center build-out in general: “Build the future, but don’t ask ordinary communities to quietly pay the price for it,” he concludes. “It’s got to be in the right place, at the right scale, with the protections agreed for everyone.”

This is a message we have heard repeatedly over the last year, across the US and now increasingly in the UK, as the tide of public opinion against AI and its physical manifestation - data centers - rises.

The concerns are mainly valid. Communities are rightly worried that they may end up literally paying the price for the AI infrastructure build-out through higher electricity bills. There is also no point pretending that these facilities do not require large, noisy, and long construction projects, which cause disruption for people living nearby. And quite apart from anything else, no one wants a data center springing up in their backyard.

But the Apex data center will not be in anyone’s backyard. It will be on a piece of land already zoned for industrial use, sandwiched between two roads and bordered to the south by a dual carriageway. It is next to a Tesco superstore and a Park and Ride site, and there are no houses in the immediate vicinity. In other words, it seems like a good place to put a data center.

The main bones of contention, according to Humphrey, are that the data center will be noisy (the developer has said it has a mitigation plan for this) and that the site is less than a mile from the Marston Marsh nature reserve. He also scoffs at the idea that the Apex project will create only 100-150 jobs, describing this as a “laughable” benefit. Having worked in Norfolk for a time, I know that schemes creating *only* 100 jobs do not come along every week.

Humphrey is, of course, entitled to his opinion, and is far from the first high-profile figure to use their platform to bash data centers. But interventions like this, which feel rooted in NIMBY-ism rather than reality, will not help facilitate an honest discussion about where data centers should be sited and the problems the AI infrastructure build-out is causing. I would go as far as to say they are actively harmful to the cause of those who have a real axe to grind against the data center industry, because they can lead to everyone who complains getting tarred with the NIMBY brush.

Recently I reported on a data center project in Scotland where the walls of a 1,000-year-old castle could be destroyed to make way for the campus. Though the developer says it will incorporate brickwork from the castle into its project, removing this piece of history that has stood for centuries seems like fairly egregious behavior. Is trying to build a data center on an empty field near a main road outside Norwich similarly egregious? I would say probably not.

Humphrey is right to point out in his video that the UK needs data centers - the government estimates an additional 6GW of AI-ready IT capacity is required by 2030 for the country to remain competitive. He is also correct to say they need to be in the right place. But if the right place is simply defined as being “as far away from my house as possible," then it is difficult to see how anything will ever be built.