A lot of people here are portraying the opposition to data centers as being uneducated hypocrites who are against anything getting built. When you look at what the opposition are saying, they generally know what they are talking about. Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.
Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...
Yea, a lot of the opposition is around these deals being cut at 3:00 in the morning in secret meetings in a shady, smoke-filled room, deliberately avoiding public input and scrutiny. Even if it's not grift and corruption, it certainly looks like grift and corruption.
I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
Seeing multiple data centers sprouting up all over rural Ohio on a recent drive across the state was quite jarring. All of a sudden there are like ten massive cranes and a dozen huge turbines sitting in the middle of a field of corn and soy. It may me understand a lot better why people in the area hate them.
I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing. Right now their sales pitch is basically we know it might suck having a data center in your backyard and it's a major bummer that any product involving a computer chip is vastly more expensive for the first time ever, but on the other hand our new AI technology is going to take your job and maybe destroy humanity.
I'm sure these guys aren't dumb, but they certainly act pretty dumb. What really solidified it for me was the choice they made to build data centers literally right next to neighborhoods and then run incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7. Even if they were legally allowed to do that, how they did they imagine it would go explicitly signalling that they couldn't give two shits about people living in the community? It's definitely some combination of incompetence and hubris to not predict the resulting backlash.
> I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing.
It won't. These people are fully convinced that literally everyone but them are all just clueless morons pushing back against their godlike infallible genius because we're all jealous of their wealth and power.
> isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them
More "Not in any backyard until deal structures are guaranteed to respect the gross asymmetry of participants, but at that point reasonable so let's establish those structure guarantees with federal leverage sooner than later"
In other words, welcome to NIABUDSAGTTYGAOP, BATPESLETSGWFLSTL
But I get how that's not as fun to engage with for pithy internet rhetoric.
“Nono, I’m not NIMBY, I just want to set up some goalposts that I can arbitrarily move whenever I want. I just want veto power. Trust me, I’ll use it responsibly”
Actually the datacenter boom is already making it so only the rich have access, and the rest of us can maybe rent a little. Prices out a new box lately?
The supply of computer components in the next few years is in fact fixed and cannot be changed.
After that, when more Litography machines have been built and facilities constructed, that may change. But even then I don't see how this will reduce component prices below the pre-AI-boom numbers? Chip production was already very efficient and already had very good economies of scale. Any attempt to ramp up production quickly will just lead to higher costs in facility construction, that need to be recouped. (Unless AI is a bubble that bursts, at which point components will be cheap, but only for a moment)
You’re making the case against infrastructure spending to meet demand needs in general. Your argument applies to oil prices, housing prices, inflation in general and I think that’s silly. CapEx Eventually does get subsumed into profit and debt.
Other than war, price pressure is the only lever we have for abundance and a pivot against a future of rationing and constant whinging and committee hearings about which technology is allowed to use how much RAM.
The US is in a very fortunate position at the top of the global AI food chain. We don't build the chips, we don't build the machines that build the chips, we don't mine the rare earths that make up the chips.
But the chips land on our soil and are programmed by our companies (often by immigrants).
I think if we forfeit our spot it could be pretty bad economically.
Yes this is exactly what NIMBYs who want to prevent new housing from existing say. And preventing people in a community from having a day in what gets built in their neighborhoods is precislely what state level YIMBY laws in California are intended to do.
If you cannot see the fundamental difference between building datacenters that suck power, provide no local jobs, are a nuisance, and can be located almost anywhere and housing for people I simply don’t know what to tell you.
Your point is that the arguments are topologically similar but you are ignoring the impacts.
The impacts of data centers on people living nearby are basically nothing, and pretty much all anti-data-center-sentiment is driven by misinformed or willfully-delusional people. Even the idea that it's a problem that data centers "provide no local jobs" is crazy - there are all sorts of built structures that provide no local jobs because they simply have nothing to do with a business that hires employees, the idea that a data center doing much the same thing justifies making it illegal to build is crazy.
I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.
If data centres were forced to contribute what was required to build the utility infrastructure required to support them, that might be true. For example, electricity costs.
Datacentres are generally built where poor people live. If you are on minimum wage and suddenly someone increases your electricity bill by $300 because of data centres, on top of all the other increases tied to things like energy insecurity... I can understand why people would consider that an impact.
Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
>Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
I can legally operate a slaughterhouse. How about I buy the plots on both sides of your house and start killing, gutting and cleaning cows, pigs, sheep and other animals?
Any waste can be removed a couple times a week.
I'd expect that you'd object to that perfectly reasonable business plan, yes?
What's that? There are laws (usually zoning) about who (If anyone) can run a slaughterhouse on your street?
Whatever do you mean?
Who are you to tell me what I can do on my private property?
I don't mind that. Run a slaughterhouse around my house if you want. I live in a low regulation place regarding mixing residential/business and in fact there is already a slaughterhouse next to me.
I like a lot of what El-Sayed has said about AI, but he's kind of disingenuous here. If you add enough rules like that, nothing's ever going to get built.
I think he's perfectly fine with you (and everyone else with a functioning brain) to take the very simple logical leap to infer that if they can't meet the list of requirements for building, then they should not build.
But you want him to come out and say something that he doesn't believe (and has personally contradicted): that he's opposed to data centers as a point of principle, because you're ideologically convinced that that is his viewpoint, because to you that's the only reason someone would put up any type of roadblock to data center build-outs.
Maybe the people building the datacentres should come out and say they can't build them without screwing over local communities, see how that goes down.
The issue is not the intent of the rules, but the actual effect, which is 1) increasing the time and cost involved in building anything, and 2) abuse of those rules by bad-faith actors who wish to block or delay a development that would on average benefit the local community.
> that would on average benefit the local community.
The AI boosters appear to have badly failed in convincing local communities of this.
Perhaps they should have started off with an informative AI positive PR campaign rather than ... whatever it was that put local communities off the notion.
The heads of the big AI labs do seem to be pretty catastrophically bad at PR, I do agree. But this is hacker news, I thought we were meant to care about and look at the facts and not get swayed by the PR?
The facts will depend on each individual datacenter proposal. I'm not saying they all should be built or that none should be built, but that each one should be based on understanding of what each proposal entails that is grounded in reality as opposed to emotive broad-strokes generalisations that are either false in general or not necessarily true for every example, and ideally the tools available in the decision making process empower the former and not the latter.
What is the benefit of a data center to the local community? This is the real problem. Best case, it’s eh, whatever. It doesn’t provide jobs, but if planned and built properly it is largely inoffensive (provided that it does not cause electricity rates to rise; this is pretty locally specific as different electricity markets work different ways). Worst case, you have Elon Musk putting old jet engines next to your house, or that Bitcoin miner in Texas where neighbours report 90db noise.
At the very least, laws need to prevent the second case.
I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
This is like saying "tech employees don't raise rents, landlords raise rents in response to tech employees offering their fat salaries" - it's a distinction without a difference and the end result is what people object to.
OK, let's take that example. It is true -- landlords are responsible for raising rents, and they do so in response to demand for housing. In some places, landlords are not allowed to arbitrarily raise rents -- for example, by limiting rent increases to follow the CPI. In theory you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
This reminds me of the short-form video (Daily Show?) I saw recently of a man in a red hat insisting that the government should facilitate union workers increasingly gaining ownership of the companies and corporations they work for.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
Right, but the point is not that it is possible, it is that there are other, more important issues here. Let's say we regulate the utilities so that residential customers will not be impacted by industrial users (or by DC operators specifically). The result would be higher utility bills for those industrial users, which would encourage the use of things like turbine generators -- which I would say is a negative outcome we should avoid.
It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.
Rents rise in proportion to the rest of the market, you look at comparables. The market is a function of supply and demand. When my city passed a bunch of tenant laws ~16k units left the market and rents went up proportionally.
> utility companies raise rates in response to demand,
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
>>“- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. I would add, “no property tax breaks”.
Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
Regulated monopolies can be more efficient than state ownership... if the regulatory framework has the correct incentives. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do.
The benefit with regulated monopolies are that you have a separation of control between regulation (from PSC/voters) and monopoly (running its business).
If the current regulatory regime isn't producing the desired results, it can be changed.
With straight state ownership, things are much more entangled.
Florida passed a state law that has standards are somewhat close to what you wrote, yet communities down here still voted to ban datacenter construction.
This is why free markets need reasonable legislation.
Even if a good willing CEO wants to do what's right, he is pressured not to do it by the unlegislated free market - his company is at (economical) disadvantage with the opposition, putting the company at risk or not meeting his obligations to shareholders. Let's not blame consumers either, because they cannot be informed about consequences in the nth order either.
If the legislation is reasonable, everyone must play by the same rules, both the good and the bad willing CEOs. The companies gain trust, the government too, and the consumers (and affected citizens) win.
These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.
Yes, I want the datacenter just not in my backyard. Of all buildings, a datacenter is the most amenable to being put somewhere else. Maybe we can have it nearby if the corp is bringing something to the table. What's the problem?
And yeah I use cloud services. They aren't charities, I pay for those.
Or put another way, NIMBY is used as a slur but not every NIMBY position is unreasonable.
We need landfills but I don’t want to live next to a landfill. Maybe we could come to a compromise where you build the thing in a way that doesn’t negatively impact me.
Perhaps it's just you, because the votes say otherwise. Housing NIMBYism is people who already have homes preventing new ones from being built, for their own benefit (Price increases on existing stock). That's not what's happening with data centers.
NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes, and covers more than just homeowners. Instead, it covers when residents oppose things like schools, public transit, electricity generation, infrastructure, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
The person I initially responded to was specifically talking about housing NIMBYism, not NIMBYs in general. I pointed out how homeowners are typically the ones opposing new housing, which is not the case with data centers.
You responded with “NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes” which is true but not what was being responded to.
By the same logic, you obviously won't mind if there are open-cut-mines; a sewage plant; a tannery; a telecommunications rocket launch facility and a container shipping terminal next to your backyard.
I won't mind a shipping terminal. The rest have some pollution issues so probably should be some distance from residences. Data centers have no pollution issues and I won't mind living next door to one either. I never had problems with seeing industry, I like seeing industry, its a great sign of progress and technology.
Collossus 2's pollution from on site power generation is well documented. There's also noise; depending on the design you could have a 24/7 hum plus infrasound. These things can be unbelievable nuisances if they are built without caring, near residences.
Data centres causes noise pollution which has health impacts. Similarly, a shipping terminal, will generate particulate pollution (until they move to EV and/or trains), noise pollution and perhaps light pollution (if it's a 24/7 port).
But as you've (rightfully) indicated, not all pollution is offensive to all. You might even be able to benefit from that, I imagine housing near industrial areas might be cheaper. And we do need mines; sewage system; leather; satellites...and even data centres.
By no means am I suggesting that polluting industries should be completely banned. I believe there's a middle ground between carte blanche and a complete ban. The backlash against data centres isn't just because they are data centres. It's because they are often located in residential areas and are taking advantage of previous investments by the residents in power/water infrastructure. If they located data centres in industrial (or commercial) zones and invested to upgrade the power/water infrastructure, there'd be significantly less backlash.
Lastly, my reply was primarily directly at parineum's comment which contemptuously rejected people's legitimate concerns as if they lost all rights to democratically lobby for sensible regulation simply because something has a legitimate use in society.
Yes, personally its not just about money for me, a shipping port is scenic to me and if I could, I won't mind at all living near one.
Its because the current movement is insane and absurd made from completely imaginary flat earth level reasons, many of these protestors won't be happy with any dc at all even if they made it 10000 miles from their house. I am okay with reasonable dialog and compromise. I feel these people aren't. This is a uniquely strange phenomenon, I am not wholly ruling out the opinion of some who think this might be amplified ad sabotage by foreign powers, but then again one should never underestimate the native stupidity of americans. They elected trump twice after all.
I live near a sewage plant. One or two days a year when I am cycling past the fence on my commute, I might get a whiff of something. People really overestimate the problem.
Even if they do use AI and are happy with it, and I'd be willing to bet that isn't always the case, the services they use today clearly don't depend on data centers that haven't even been built yet. Maybe some are happy with the current shitty AI that's a fun toy to play with, but don't want new data centers built and used to train an improved AI that will make them unemployable.
Not at all. I gave houses as an example, but I hypothetically also don't want bus or rail stops anywhere near me. Or shops. Or bars. I guess it's not nimbyism since I don't own a bus stop or a shop.
Any real estate regulation can be labeled as NIMBYism. You're invoking it here as a thought-terminating cliché.
Building without considering consequences at all, or building the way that capital demands, is how you end up with urban communities getting obliterated by highways[1], or rural communities getting decimated by industrial plants[2], or indigenous communities getting destroyed by military testing[3], or indigenous people AND fragile ecosystems getting erased by military testing[4].
Not really. The regulation where everyone has to meet the same long term, unbiased standard on noise, emissions whatever, while it can also be excessive, is different from the regulation where to make use of your private property you have to follow the whims of whoever has the power. Why would data centers need to be built using union labor when there's no such requirement for anything else? In the old days you needed to placate the whims of a king to be granted the right to use your own property, now you need to placate a union boss or some design review bureaucrat.
And of course most of the examples you give are irrelevant - they don't even involve private property or specifically involve the government taking private property.
Eminent domain used to seize private land is more similar to prohibiting construction on private land, than allowing it.
Yes, I'm a NIMBY. Someone want to build more houses, maybe that's good, but the roads need to be scaled up to match. Want to build a datacenter, ok but what's in it for me? The people long-term invested in a town are the ones who should be making decisions on how to develop it, not someone coming in from the outside to make a buck.
I worked for a lab that was building a new computer room and it spent about a year in the permitting process with the local town council before getting approved. Most of the focus in that process was on the geothermal cooling system.
Why must this be done at the federal(I presume what you mean when you say national) level? Seems to me, this should be up to the local community, if they want a datacenter or not.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
> A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers.
I think the immediately preceding sentence pretty clearly laid out their rational. (Not saying I agree or disagree, just that I think your question was already answered).
People are clamoring to control what others can do on their own personal property, and then people would complain they are banned from fixing their car in their backyard. Why do people want to make their own lives worse? Do they think these laws only apply to some "other" group?
Because the tech companies operate at the national level and individual communities are at a massive disadvantage if they just negotiated individually.
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
It was recently announced that Meta was building a DC about 75km from my city that is going to be using ~1.8GW of power.
What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.
That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.
That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.
> Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.
The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"
The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this. What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
> The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this.
Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.
> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.
Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.
The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?
> The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs
I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly
I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"
Not sure what you suggest to do. Plenty of countries will love to have datacenters. And these datacenters do compute, they don't need fast data transfer, they can be anywhere, pings don't matter. Plenty of countries actually love AI.
I'd argue, the biggest problem with AI is that it makes totalitarianism a lot more attractive, because it is an infinitely big state that controls all resources: so if AI becomes everything and deprives people of agency, it's no problem: government marshals all resources anyway and people have no agency even without AI if country is totalitarian - but it can also make quick decisions with no political bullshit.
I would like the Overton window to be where you are. Till it gets there, when people are still accusing opposition of being clueless, this is a good counterpoint and resting place for agreement.
Like I said, if you watch the video I linked it's him going over his ideas for regulating the AI industry in general. I only typed up the parts regarding datacenters because it was what's most relevant to the article and the discussion.
Corporate power is now so great that they successfully lobby to reduce/eliminate their tax burden so they don't pay for infrastructure they need.
Workers pay that cost through increased market prices and taxes (eg energy) which also drives up other prices. It's not inflationary because it's a real value adjustment but everyone can pretend it is while real term wages drop even further.
This all seems reasonable. My question is, how would data centre bossess genuinely respond to these points?
I find it difficult get to the genuine points, as the whole topic is piled high with “arguments”, PR, marketing, and other junk discourse being emitted from all sides.
Kevin Oleary's data center is going to be built one hour from my town. A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center. Here's what I hear and my response:
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.
Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
Did you miss the whole "Stop Hiring Humans" billboards that were all over SF?
Or Microsoft's AI chief's "I think we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So, white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer — either being, you know, a lawyer, or an accountant, or a project manager, or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Or Dario's "software engineering will be fully automated in 12 months" or "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs"
Or Altman's “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me... On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”
Either you've been living under a rock, or you're pretending to be ignorant.
Yes, not living in SF I did miss the SF billboards. You’re very insulting to non-SF folks, you know that? Perhaps I am neither “living under a rock” nor “pretending” anything?
The others speak to human labor shifting. Word processors wiped out the typist profession, but that is not the same as wiping out jobs in general. The corporate goal of WordStar, WordPerfect, etc, was never to cause unemployment for typists, even if that was the effect.
You still didn’t cite anything supporting the claim that these companies have a goal of causing mass unemployment. You’re choosing to interpret observations in a way that maximizes your confirmation bias. IMO it is equally valid to interpret those statements as envisioning shifting human work to higher value areas.
Replacing human jobs should be the dream of all people. You want humans doing drudgery when it could be automated by machines? Why?
> And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
— Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891
> I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading
That's unfortunate, as manual labor will be the only thing left if AI companies have their way.
Yea thats fine but you think they will distribute the wealth to you in particular?
i mentioned it in my comment too
> Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners.
i am not conviced that markzuckerberg stays up all night building datacenters so he can pass on that wealth to you.
This is explicitly about manual labor. The things on the verge of being automated are precisely not in the "sweeping a slushy crossing" category. If Wilde was here to see the things the slop-peddlers are calling art, he'd be distraught.
That would be true under a good economic system. Instead we have a system where the benefits are reaped by the few, and the masses get to either work or starve. Taking away the "work" option is, needless to say, offensive to those.
i get the impression that comment was tongue in cheek, but my unironic opinion is that AI is bad for humanity, and it's good and correct to oppose data centers on the grounds that AI is bad.
According to The Reverse Centaur’s Guide,[1] capital investment in AI is so high that the only possible way for the investments to make enough (and to avoid a bubble) is if whole classes of jobs are automated wholesale. And of course that Capital then takes the saved money from that. Maybe some people dislike datacenters-for-AI based on that. Because it’s all part of the same scheme.
Maybe people who don’t quite like that should be more articulate about it rather than using seeming post hoc reasoning like “water”? I don’t know. In my experience the bar for frustrated-five-on-the-street is quite high if they want to avoid an aww-shucks this voting bloc and their social medias.
Most people probably don't do that much research on these things. But they have heard about water shortages, and they have all been exposed to horror stories from around the world about data centers causing pollution, or horrifying noise, or whatever. Is the nature of the news cycle.
This might be the case, but it's not going to stop the technology from stealing your jobs. Billionaires in countries like China are going to leap frog over the US in terms of technology or the billionaires here will just build there instead.
If you think Flock cameras are bad, you have no idea the kind of surveillance the Chinese government uses on their people.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped trying to help people help themselves. Instead, I just watch and close my door in their face when they beg for help.
It's fairly easy to see how having your local government spying on you could be a problem. It's much harder to see how a government on the other side of the world spying on you is a problem.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?
The build out will take a couple years. I don't care about the noise. No one will hear it. It's an hour away from anything. Truly in the middle of nowhere. The DC will employee probably 100 high paid people. That money goes back into my town. The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC. It's going to be the biggest tax generator this county has ever seen by a lot. We just had to raise property taxes by 37% to fund our schools. We need the money.
I seriously doubt it needs 100 highly paid people. These will be automated to death. A few guys employed out of state, periodically visiting to swap out dead GPUs and staying in the nearest hotel. Maybe a bored HVAC engineer on site for maintenance.
I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
I don't know much about this, but isn't Stratos ultimately planned to be 9GW, or 250x the size of your 36MW DC? Even if it doesn't scale proportionally, it's not hard to see it get to 100 people.
According to Oleary it will employ about 5000 permanent workers. According to the county it will employ 1-2k permanent workers. These are going to be rented out data centers to other companies who will staff their people here. There will need to be a large number of people managing the power generation. What resources do you have to say it won't employ 100 people?
These numbers are pretty inconsistent with other major data center rollouts. Furthermore, there are no repercussions (AFAIK) if the project fails to deliver that many permanent jobs. Oleary can say all he wants but unless there is some specific tax or legal measure that says "you must pay at least 2,000 FTE at a rate of $150k/year for at least 20 years" then it's basically impossible to guarantee these numbers. And frankly no data center developer would sign up for that liability knowing full well that humans at data center may well end up being automated (even more than they are today).
The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.
The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?
You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?
You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.
You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.
> The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC
You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.
According to the county 30 million per year during the build out then 108 million at max capacity. Our budget last year was 76.3 million. This will be more money than we know what to do with.
"This will be more money than we know what to do with." That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. This is what leads to inflated city budgets, wasteful/risky projects and fraud.
The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.
If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.
All of these counter points? Do you think they're going to pull a fast one and move the building hundreds of miles at the last second into someone's back yard? What about water? Are they going to at the last minute change the cooling from a closed loop system? This is going to use 162 million gallons less per year than the farm. How in the world is the DC going to burn through that much extra water at the last minute? Are they going to pull a fast one on us and just hook the building into the grid? What are you talking about?
You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
1. Closed loop water systems use chemicals that can leech out of the system. There is 100% going to be more discoveries as time goes on with such a fast build out. Maybe not enough to make it not worthwhile? But not 100% safe either.
2. I’m anti-data center. I think at some point, you pull the levers you have? I think the tech industry is too consolidated and wields too much power, and the whole data center buildout has been done under a shroud of secrecy.
I think it’s rational to pull the levers you have, when the industry is predicting something close to the apocalypse.
Yes it’s mostly vibes, but until the industry stops acting like fucking nutters. I’m voting on vibes.
No, I just know how business works. When you are doing something like this you establish the bare minimum as the baseline, get your foot in the door, then start testing boundaries.
Also these buildings will be abandoned within the next couple years as models move more towards the edge.
Are you saying they're going to construct the data center then move it to a different location? Or are you suggesting they're going to change the laws of physics so that sound propagates differently?
I'm saying that just because they say that they will generate their own electricity, or require less water than a farm, doesn't mean that they will continue to do so into the future.
What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
> What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.
The problem is that anyone who actually cares about such thing has like a dozen better venues to deal with it than data centers, yet they haven't in their lives thought of a single one.
Then the DC should surely help fund it, and its existence should be dependent in its completion? Otherwise it will be like every other large scale development that offers this without being on the hook.
If the concern is non-localized resource or debt contention how is it different from any business?
I get generalized anxiety about pace of progress, but then let’s have that discussion rather than the canards about water or noise (which can be real in some cases, but taking GP at their word that’s not the case here).
This is the crux. It's different because data centers are illegally operating gas turbines. If CVS were playing loud music all night every night, nobody would doubt the ability of local law enforcement to shut it down. That is not true of (specifically) AI data centers, so it is rational to reject them until law enforcement gains the ability to police them.
Someone with more knowledge than my 2-minutes of googling should correct me, but...
It sounds like they'd be using the natural gas pipeline they would generate from starts in Opal, Wyoming (goes all the way to Oregon), and that the company behind it was in huge amounts of debt and filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.
So at a glance, I'm curious if making it profitable might be helpful to everyone, but would need someone with more info to chime in before I could say that.
I recall hearing an interview with a democratic politician (can't recall who), he had this thing: data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy). This seems pretty reasonable to me, if the data centres pay for any build-out of the grid required for their operation and bring online green energy, then they are fine. For the community, worst case they go bust and leave behind an improved grid. Off-grid gas generators are not BYONCE.
>data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy)
This is just another way of saying "no data centers can be built". The people who want to build data centers don't care what it's powered by, but they choose gas turbines over wind & solar because renewables can't handle the power demands.
That seems like an awfully defeatist attitude. With all the capital investment flowing into AI, there should be plenty of money to research and improve renewables (including fusion, fission, and battery technology) to meet the moment. After all, we need to move past fossil fuels and are already delayed on this path, so AI is a good catalyst (among many) to make progress.
On a meta-level, it's terrible politics for tech companies to roll out a technology that many don't see a need for and fear will take away their livelihood, while at the same time increasing CO2 emissions because renewables are too hard. Of course this course of action runs into massive opposition.
I'm not sure how this is a defeatist attitude, I view it more like a realist one. Any rules that would be passed to require mandatory clean energy sourcing for data centers would probably mimic new vehicle emission regulations, which are purposely designed to be so hard to meet that it's a de facto ban.
Have you tried asking Claude? Surely it can solve the problem of "how can we power AI with clean energy?" I mean, if it couldn't do that ... well, it wouldn't really be useful enough to justify building all these datacenters, would it?
A community is not a sovereign nation. I know that eminent domain is considered by many (and historically rightly so) to be a dirty tool, but sometimes it really is in the benefit of the country and its economy to build things even if the people living in or around that area don't like it, especially if their only reason to resisting is "I don't like it".
I get that they have a right to self determination but when did that start meaning others can’t have opinions about (perceived) short sightedness?
Am I allowed to think less of people who vote for stuff like mandatory prayer in schools, even if it is their community and their right to vote for what they want?
Since data centre projects are getting rammed through at breakneck speed despite very widespread opposition, it might look to others like your opinion is actually worth significantly more than theirs, simply because it happens to be shared by a handful of people with god tier money.
Thinking that people should decide if an infrastructure megaproject of dubious utility to their community should be built? Basically identical to thinking that people should decide what races live in their community and whether slavery is allowed.
The HN crashout over people suddenly disliking hyperscalers for some reason is something you could only witness here.
Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls
Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.
And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.
"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.
Yes, I do. Know why I think that? Under threat of another expensive lawsuit, my local datacenter forced our town council to give a 50% tax cut for 12 years. So they are already able to not pay about 1.7 billion in taxes. If they could pay $0, they would.
So your town gave up $140 million PER YEAR in tax revenue to avoid an expensive lawsuit? I call bullshit.
EDIT: I looked it up, not surprisingly, you're really shading the truth here. This is the barn, yes? So it looks like what happened is that the township denied the application for the DC, the developer sued, and the township cut a deal to let the DC go through, with a 50% cut to their tax bill for 12 years. Then the value of the DC went up dramatically, because AI, and the township tried to claim that the tax cut was for 50% of the original value when they approved the tax cut, not 50% of the property value when the tax is due. Their own attorney told them that was bullshit, so they eventually dropped it.
This is like if a store gives you a coupon for 50% off and then you take it in to redeem it a few months later and they've quadrupled their prices, and they try to tell you the coupon actually means 50% off of what their prices were when you got the coupon. Ridiculous.
Deportations were big under Obama, I am not sure of the data under Biden. America is strong against illegal immigration. Democratic or Republican I think you are not discussing this in good faith.
This land he's building it on is cheap and I look forward to my county using it to advantage everyone. Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?"
also you
* "A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center."
* "I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me."
First, maybe they don't trust the company doing the development, or Kevin Oleary. What they are saying may or may not be true, but if they've made a habit of being casual with the truth or not following through on their word it doesn't really matter, does it?
That is tough, and it is why it's so important to maintain one's reputation.
Second, I seem to recall Oleary running around to news outlets telling anyone with a camera that the only reason that anyone would oppose the project was if they were somehow working with the PRC and trying to hurt America.
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?" is a very valid thing you said, and I actually respect it. If, instead, I said something like, "you are just tool of Elon Musk and AI has tricked you" it would probably feel insulting and you would be predisposed be hostile to me.
I think the way the project was done was disrespectful to other people in the area. Ultimately, laws and the voting process will handle it as it should be. If the project can be relied on to bring the benefits without causing the harm that you claim it will, it should be a slam dunk case.
Third, people are concerned about economic security and loss from AI and this specific project can't escape it. Our field has made its own bed there. These concern are valid and public statements by the involved CEOs and large scale layoffs can't be easily dismissed.
Because in Ontario, where his mansion is located, the government hasn't been approving such projects and is facing pressure not to. (https://globalnews.ca/news/12134754/ford-government-to-appro...) Even if the province approved, the lake community surrounding his mansion might not want one, for all the same reasons that the US voters in the source article don't want one.
What about emissions from the generation of this power in salt lake valley? I believe a big argument was the valley with its inversions and geographical layout makes that pollution much worse for people who live in it.
This DC will be probably a 3 hour drive from the Salt Lake valley. We're building a nuclear power plant as well which is going to help with pollution.
Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property. I'm just happy we're getting such a good deal out of this.
> Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property.
When there is political will we can absolutely restrict people from doing things with their property. This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
Whether the political will in your specific case has reached that point is another issue, but in many cases it seems to be approaching that level, especially where existing or proposed developments seem like they will directly impact the community that's already there.
The nuclear power plant will only help with pollution if it replaces existing fossil fuel use. If it just meets growing demand, pollution persists, and if growing demand is also filled by some fossil fuels then pollution increases, but just a bit slower because of the nuclear.
And there it is, folks. That is the key issue here - or at least, one of them. This new data center would pollute the environment, not to mention taking up land. The consideration, then, is whether the need for yet another data center justifies the added pollution and land use. That’s a value judgment, and it seems a lot of people say no, we don’t need more data centers, not even for “AI” - at least not enough to justify the added pollution.
You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.
It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.
Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.
Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.
These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.
There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.
I hear that a lot and I'm happy with my county for making sure we get a good deal out of this. I think a lot of people are informed by the few bad cases and think that all DCs are going to do this.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.
They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid. We're currently building a nuclear reactor in my county as well. This is economic growth and a good thing. My town is dying. Main street is depressing. There's a general lack of optimism in the people here.
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
A "small" datacenter I personally know if in a municipality I am directly involved with generates about $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage) tariff. That ignores any property taxes and the rest.
This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.
I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.
This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.
These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.
Comed in this case. So the PJM interconnect region.
The locality tax is in addition to everything else paid on the electric bill.
And yes, datacenters have always been about converting electrons to photons, density of photonic output and electron input steadily increasing over time.
Data centers and almost all big companies don’t bring in any taxes. They negotiate zero property taxes for 30 years and have govts pay them money, because they say the half dozen people they employ are going to create a boom in the economy, they will buy houses, eat out, go to bars and this will create money for the local govt and property taxes.
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.
Ooo, this is exciting, I so rarely get to be the random dumbass crawling out of the woodwork to provide a statistically-unlikely counterexample to an otherwise sound point!
I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.
Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.
This is exactly the argument people are worried about. "If prices go up, it's a good thing." For whom? Residents will have to pay this for a decade before a nuclear reactor comes online.
If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!
And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.
Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.
That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day for the sake of shareholder value.
> That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day
Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.
> for the sake of shareholder value
This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.
> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
No they aren't
They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit
They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.
The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.
>> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
> No they aren't
You literally said they are building data centers to cater to demand later on in your own comment:
> If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built
There you go. Your own point debunked by your own words.
> They aren't benevolently trying to help you out
I didn't say anything about the owners building stuff out of charity or benevolence. Are you responding to the wrong comment? Yours is more-or-less irrelevant to mine in addition to being self-contradictory.
Please own up to the fact that you self-contradicted yourself in your own comment by first claiming that "No they aren't" and then "If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built".
> It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built
...and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant. Do you understand what relevance means? It means that there's meaning, implication. You haven't given a single follow-on implication from that hypothesis that actually matters to the discussion.
> Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards
No, this is just factually false.
Fact: for datacenters, without market demand, without a buyer, shareholder value cannot possibly be generated.
So, first there is a market, and then companies act on it to generate shareholder value.
You're living in a world detached from reality where "shareholder value" exists as its own separate entity that can generate market demand.
You need to take a high-school level economics course so that you don't make objectively incorrect statements like this.
> If you think people's motivations are irrelevant
I never said that peoples' motivations are irrelevant in general. Just that they're irrelevant in this specific case. You're putting words in my mouth, which clearly indicates malice.
> then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing
We do. I live in reality, where most people understand basic facts of economics, causality is meaningful, and you still haven't actually provided a reason why you think that the motivations matter, so as far as the rest of us in the real world know, they don't. You've had three comments to point that out, and you haven't, so the reasonable conclusion is that you don't have a reason, and you're running away to avoid that intellectual dissonance.
There can be multiple effects for a given action. The main objection I have to this argument is the idea that the only beneficiaries of any corporate decision are the shareholders.
> Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction
You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
> This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me.
At my company's internal conference we had a rep from one of our partners come speak, and he emphasized that a significant value-add of our company's relationship to our partners is that we're much more tech-forward. he went on to say "Execs in [partner industry] don't know what AI is or what it does, but they know that they want it."
We're seeing AI features being bolted into every application under the sun, whether it actually adds functionality or not. I think you bear a significant burden of proof to the claim that the demand for datacenters is in turn driven by consumer demand for AI, and company boards losing their minds over what they think AI can do and demanding their R&D divisions sink millions of dollars into AI spend to try and capitalize on their dreams.
I'm reminded of Bitcoin: for a hot minute every startup was talking about blockchain and GPUs were getting snapped up by miners left and right because of what people imagined the value could be. That's what I'm getting at when I say "shareholder value:" these developments seem to be less about what value a company is _actually_ producing (& thus the inherent cost-of-goods-sold demand), and more about the _possibility_ of what value a company _could_ produce.
> You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
This is a good point. I see that I misunderstood your original argument - I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful, rather than what you actually said, which was the perception of and response to the increase. My apologies. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
If I get a vote about new economic activity, and it makes me personally poorer, I'm going to need a very good argument as to why I should permit it. Or, you know, pay me.
If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.
If that new economic activity has lopsided benefits and will never pay off for those negatively impacted by those price increases, then yeah shut it down or regulate it so that the benefits are shared equally by all. Shorter version, if the new economic activity is exploitive of people and their communities, then shut it down hard.
Generally, economic activity is supposed to raise living standards. AI promisses to a.) speed up climate change b.) facilitate surveillance and authoritarian tech bros b.) make people obsolete and unemployable c.) kill us all because reasons.
Datacenter is not bringing more economic activity to the area.
Further question, why is it the default position that others should have a say on legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land? Thats frankly absurd. It should be on the people breaching others private property rights to prove real damages.
Pretending that market-distorting impacts on local utilities, air pollution, noise pollution, etc. etc. are just "legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land" is flabbergastingly dishonest.
Are you sure about noise pollution or are you copying something heardd from uninformed people? Again, thr onus should be on you tonprove damages in court. Its fucking ridiculous that people are clamoring to control others private property.
How can you be sure the workshop on your property doesn't have external impacts? You are being a bad community player by not first getting your workshop inspected and tested and awaiting the permission of the community and government before doing anything there.
This is an intellectually dishonest and frankly completely inappropriate attempt to twist someone’s words. HN generally has good standards about acceptable comments and I’m surprised to see this here.
If we brought them up a decade earlier we wouldn’t have had to wait. Instead, we were told “renewables can replace fossil fuels”, despite us lacking the battery capacity to make them viable for the grid. Nuclear is a direct replacement for fossil fuels with better energy generation and actual on-demand capabilities, plus it’s far safer than fossil fuel-backed media will admit. We could have been using both and have completely cut down on emissions while also increasing the lifetime of our nuclear stores.
For that little old retired lady who is on a fixed income, of course! It means she'll have to sell that cute little house of hers and let someone turn it into an AirBnB and make some actual money from it.
It sounds like your town needs a monorail! Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity.
Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.
> This is economic growth and a good thing.
Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.
Using electricity is not breaking anything. "If I sell all my widgets, it's actually a good thing because I'll have to hire more people and manufacture more widgets" is entirely coherent.
Using electricity to the point that the grid cannot accommodate it is indeed breaking something that was working before, and the data center folks are surely not going to be the only ones paying for the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate it.
It'd be like your widget maker harvesting wood for their widgets from public land and exhausting it so the public is left without this resource, then expecting the public to pay to arrange for more wood to be grown to replace the wood they used up.
Did you know that global average temperatures are the highest they've been in 125,000 years, and temperatures are rising more than 20x faster than natural rates of global warming. Also the oceans are 30% more acidic, and the world's land ice is melting at a rate of like 660 billion tons per year. There's probably around 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere because warmer air holds more moisture and warmer water evaporates more quickly. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Etc etc
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
It's always convenient for you when someone else has to make sacrifices to their job security, housing, financial future, and comfort in order to save the environment, when you get to enjoy all the perks of their sacrifice, without needing to make any equivalent sacrifices yourself.
Seems like this can go both ways. You should volunteer to have a bank of loud, polluting turbines from obsolete passenger jets running 24/7 next to your home so Meta can serve GenAI ads with 5% lower latency.
Only if you subscribe to the logic that somehow I support datacenters built in peoples' back yards, which I never claimed, but you made up. If you make stuff up, you can make any argument you want.
Sorry, your small town getting a short stint of construction work followed by maybe 20 sysadmins, is not worth the pollution that DC will pump.
I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?
Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.
Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.
My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.
In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.
Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.
I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.
>We all share this world.
Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.
>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?
> care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns.
It's CO2, it's in my town too.
I'm saying, the minor economic boon for this small town is not remotely worth the pollution over the lifetime of that data center ran off turbines.
> while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society
We could enjoy the modern luxuries a bit more without Altman Et. Al. working to centralize labor into expensive automated Capital that we'd all have to rent back. Hell, even with some pollution caused by relocating manufacturing stateside.
I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
>I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
That's why in my country the government is incentivizing via fiscal policies for employers to be cancelling all home office perks to employers. To get people back to spending money on commuting.
>Michigan
So what's your opinion on building car factories there? If we remove those factories, air there would be cleaner.
Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)
Ok that's nice, but it's not enough and now you want to add a bunch of natural gas power plants? Is that going to increase or decrease geenhouse gas emissions?
Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.
That's great, but it's still not enough. We don't just need to drop by 30% of some number, we need to eliminate all carbon emissions and we need to start sequestering the emissions produced for over a century.
...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.
Slow to build, capital intensive. I would have loved a large build out of nuclear 30 years ago. Even now if you get one online more power to you. I just don't see it ever being a major part of the solution now. It's time came and went.
1) Years. I would say reducing carbon emissions is a higher priority for humanity than building more DCs, so building the nuclear plant should be a prerequisite for building the DC.
2) Dry cask storage. It works and it is extremely safe, you can leave the casks on site or bury them wherever you want. The most significant concern with nuclear waste is not the radiation, it is the possibility of radioactive materials leaking into the environment and that is exactly the problem dry casks solve.
2.1) Reprocessing, you can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by recycling fissile uranium and plutonium from spent fuel into new fuel pellets. The remaining waste is typically embedded in glass, which can be placed in dry cask storage (see above).
Nuclear waste is not the problem people think it is. We know how to deal with it and we have been dealing with it for a long time now. For comparison, solar panels do break down over time and solar panel waste includes several toxic heavy metals that can leak into the local environment. Nobody objects to solar power by pointing to the waste stream (let alone the waste created by all those batteries that you need to make solar power useful for industrial operations like DCs).
Imagine we focused this anti-DC energy on things that actually have material impacts, like meat consumption and air conditioning.
I'd imagine it's something like each American eating half as many cheeseburgers a year would offset all current and projected emissions from DC energy usage.
Gosh I sure am glad natural gas isn't a major fuel for grid-based generation, and under contention with residential heating. If that were the case, all that extra demand on a limited resource could drive prices up.
Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.
A nearby town was doing pretty well. Then suddenly on a ton of visible land were built either RV/boat storage places or u-store places. The town feels aweful. Lots of those people able to are moving away because the town just feels bad now. That one move dramatically changed that towns direction/future forever.
And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.
I was with you for a while here but you say nobody has an argument, then when someone presents one you say that actually that bad thing is a good thing because we'll react to the bad thing in a good way.
> But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Your other points are generally very well-thought-out, but this one is not.
Grid expansions take years. Building new nuclear power plants takes decades. And there's "slack" in the sense that utility prices can raise substantially before there's actually impetus to start planning a grid expansion, and then you still have to wait years for construction to finish.
And the party that takes the hit for those sustained elevated electricity prices is local residents, who in general have far less capital and are disproportionally hurt by it relative to the owns of the data centers.
You can make the argument that the electricity price increases are going to be lower than most people think and wouldn't meaningfully hurt the average local resident, but that's a separate argument. I don't buy that "if it pulls power from the grid that's a good thing" is valid.
If there isn't enough power to meet demand, then build out the grid first, or tax datacenter power consumption so that the inflection pain-point before grid capacity expands is less harmful to the residents.
If building a gas turbine for the data center can be done quickly, then building a gas turbine to expand grid capacity can be done just as quickly. (Barring any poorly thought out, unprincipled regulations that would affect one but not the other.)
Apart from the immense greenhouse gas potential, if the wind blows in the wrong direction, you will definitely still get the combustion products. This would be much higher on my priority list than long-term tax revenues.
Maybe these companies can't prevent their own bots from escaping containment and breaching others' systems, but nuclear is surely easier -- and if there's any issue, superintelligence can mitigate the damage.
By the time any of these nuclear plants come online, The current deferred tech debt apocalypse will have played out. The market is efficient, but the efficiency is very weak. This is no exception.
We are also building a nuclear power plant in the county. I'm excited for the growth that's going to bring. The other reply to this comment is uneducated. Nuclear is incredibly safe.
Nuclear plants take over a decade to build. Data centers take a few months or years. New nuclear isn't going to power any data centers for a long, long time.
Only valid point I've heard. We'll see what happens. All I'm saying is the DC is happening. We can't stop it. That'd be illegal. At least we're getting a good deal out of it.
"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"
How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.
In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.
I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.
My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)
The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers
It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.
And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.
What a surprise people don’t want massive structures used for shady purposes built by sociopaths, which may or may not use massive amount of power and resources, which may or may not be used to displace the entirety of the labor work force, or destroy what’s left of society to develop better algorithms. To also be built literally in unfathomablr quantities, in almost ever decent piece of land, using unfathomable amounts of money.
Seriously what’s peoples problem?
This is one of those situations where HN is too smart and thinks logic is the same as reality. Life exists outside of computers
The posturing from AI executives has been this will destroy labor. Whether or not that actually happens doesn’t matter - that’s their stance, their dream. They say it basically every chance they get.
Why, then, would average people want to help the people who very plainly state they are against them? It makes no sense.
Everyone here is shocked that average people aren’t willingly to obviously advocate against themselves. Uh, yeah duh. Nobody would.
There’s a lot of well-earned distrust in AI as a whole. The end result is people don’t trust AI companies or their endeavors. This distrust was curated and built by people like Altman and Dario. It didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you want people to support your projects, you have to at least PRETEND you’re on their side. Telling them straight-up “I intend to ruin your life” isn’t a winning strategy. And, everyone, let’s stop pretending like this is our first day on Earth.
Exactly. What, other than buy yacht and cocaine and hooker, are you going to do with all that money, Sam Altman? Pretend we already gave you all the money. What job can my nephews go to school for so that they will have a career 10 years from now? What research institutes are you going to create to hire people to do the remaining jobs, Sam Altman? I didn't vote for you to be the guy that gets to decide but we live under American Crapitalism so that's the direction we're going.
It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...
It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.
At this point I really can't see any other justification. The amount of misinformation and hysteria around this issue is like nothing I've seen before.
I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"
Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.
Thank you for being one of the few thoughtful responses. I do feel like people's opinions here are more a position on AI in general than this data center. I come from a stance of, "this is happening so we might as well benefit from it"
Well yes. If a car window gets broken in your town, well that's a simple crime. But if entire parking lots full of cars get their windows broken out that's a crime spree and resources need setup in dealing with it.
The issue with incremental problems and quantity problems is you can't point at a single one and go "here, here is the problem" (at least most of the time), you have to look at the entire problem and go "Shit, the paperclip maximizer building one paperclip isn't an issue, it's turning everything into paperclips that's the issue".
I'm over "this is happening". Like Silicon Valley seems to think it should be implicitly true that their libertarian maximalism should be accepted by the rest of the country. Maybe this is thinking "conservatively" and that's a dirty word, but I don't think it's crazy to ask the capitalists to go back to talking about how their businesses will help normies, and not just steamrolling people with "you can't stop growth". If opposing datacenters makes SV rethink their growth strategies. I'm all for it.
Yes. Oleary bought the farm and there will be no farm there anymore. Using the grid would be good for us too. That's economic growth. There will be short term pain but the increased power use will lead to more jobs. We're already building a nuclear power plant.
Except, of course, that farms use unprocessed water for irrigation and datacenters use treated water for cooling. If the project has its own onsite water treatment, and water rights to the aquifer, then that might be fine, but the majority of these projects expect nearby municipal resources at a scale no farm ever has.
People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.
>People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living.
My Hatian neighbors who do gig economy stuff and are totally not running a car dismantling operation on the side would absolutely benefit if all the people who complain about them and are the driving political force behind the rules used to harass them were disempowered and impoverished.
I think they're a pretty extreme example but you see people in situations like this all across the blue collar economy.
You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.
>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.
The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.
Tremonton. My understanding is they're getting their gas from a Wyoming company that just declared bankruptcy so good for them. The DC will help them out a lot. I look forward to the nuclear plant opening to help with the other concerns.
AFAIK, the reason for the position was to tap into a large national gas line that runs between Utah and Idaho. I'm not sure where the wyoming company would come into play unless they are purchasing the company and resuming extraction operations.
I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.
In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.
I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.
In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?
You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.
Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".
Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?
Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers:
* Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc).
* Massive economic destabilization and disruption
* Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility
* Wars and international conflict
* Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry
* Takeover by governments, use by threat actors
* A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.
People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.
The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.
> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation
There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities
Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.
WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."
And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.
Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.
Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.
I think a lot of this can be chalked up to poor regulation. People think it will cause bad effects because the government bodies and processes are not trusted to prevent that.
This is why it's important for government to be built on principles and law, not merely on popular opinion.
From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.
While I agree with where you're coming from in general, the surveillance industry has been happily coasting on downplaying and rejecting such principles for quite some time. Principles like freedom of speech, freedom to own things you purchase, privacy from ever-growing surveillance databases, freedom from unaccountable centralized permissions systems based on those surveillance databases, freedom to use computing technology that serves your own interests, freedom to partake in competitive markets rather than suffering monopolies. That general lack of principles (beyond merely centralized authoritarian control) is now coming home to roost, as people oppose these projects due to some vague sense of a lack of individual agency, but perhaps can't quite articulate why.
If their concerns had been acted on to begin with, most of the existing data centers would never have been built as people would be using computing technology under their own control rather than authoritarian-by-design "cloud" traps. So I have little sympathy for the surveillance industry now that the jig is nearly up.
I just made a comment about trade offs regarding pollution and land use. This is another good point. Everything is a trade off. If we use a lot of water to get food we need to survive, or even tasty food we enjoy, that’s worth it. But using up a lot of water for a data center, even if it’s less than a farm? That’s still a valid judgment. Lots of people clearly think that’s not worth it as a trade off.
The farm might not have made food and it might not have made food for human consumption, and even if it did make food it might not be the kind we need to survive. Remember that there are plenty of farms that exist to produce ethanol, HFCS, or inputs for beer/whiskey/etc. makers (which we do not actually need -- drinking is fun but hardly necessary for survival).
Humans do not need alfalfa to survive. None of these desert farms grow food that humans eat. Most of it gets exported so americans dont even eat the animals that eat it
I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.
The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.
>"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.
>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.
>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.
This is my read of it, I don't really have any special data about the average voter, so feel free to disregard my opinions.
I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.
I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"
At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.
That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.
few points:
1. the water usage claim is reported only by developer. However, the developer omitted the fact that more water is also need to cool down the gas power plant. The project reported only water used by the DC directly.
2. so far nothing firm is committed regarding the DC will produce power on site. I would be careful with what developer claims vs. the reality.
3. isn't the problematic refuge around Locomotive Springs?
4. sure, if you live 1hour away from the DC you won't have issue with noise. But what about the communities closer to the DC?
5. the DC is planning to use as much power as the whole Utah, what will happen with the waste heat energy?
The water you cite is groundwater. It does not return in the same lifetime it is consumed at that rate. Gaining in this context simply means losing less than before. Weasel words are exactly why voters reject building AI.
This is classic Haidt's Righteous Mind stuff -- people vibe out a moral judgement, then generate rational explanations post-hoc. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out what the vibed judgement is.
I think that part of the problem might be that people don't trust corporations. Sure, they say all that, and that may even be the current plan, but is that how things will actually end up? Will there be consequences "unintended" consequences like polution? Will this be used as a stepping stone to something that is harmful?
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
The details are definitely fuzzy when you talk to people. At the same time, the sentiment is fairly solid. People do not like AI. They do like food. A farm may use more water, but people want the output of the farm. They don't want the output of the data centers.
That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.
The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.
But then what's the implication here? Why would there be large scale propaganda or otherwise effort against large companies who have and make a lot of money? In whose interest is it to get people to dislike the data centers (other than, perhaps debatably, the people themselves)? If its all truly just people being duped, to what end does the naïvete serve?
A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.
> "Noise"
Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.
> "Wildlife refuge"
I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.
These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.
The farm grows animal feed that is exported. Why should we support that? It provides 0 value for americans outside the farmer doing the exporting and uses a shitload of the water that we desperately need to fill the lake. Im a UT district 1 voter and at this point Ill vote for anyone that bans farming here in UT. Completely unsustainable
I think that a lot of people are more sophisticated than you think, and see data center buildouts as WeWork-style unsustainable growth spurred by speculative fervour rather than business fundamentals.
What does the farm grow? Is it less valuable than what the data center will produce? Because you can't eat data. Utah is full of empty spaces that aren't being put to use (except maybe to set land speed records). Why not use those?
As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.
Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?
That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?
If we're talking about the proposed data center near Brigham City, the area is not part of the Colorado River watershed, so the data center would affect other systems but not the Colorado River.
Haha cool. I am firmly against this data-center then. /s
The joke there is that states can't agree to a thing about that watershed and also don't seem to look beyond it when they are making rules. That apparently includes my own tunnel vision.
As a resident of the Colorado River watershed, our inability to negotiate a sustainable plan for the water is one strong reason I support a moratorium on any new water intensive infrastructure (which does not include all data center designs).
> "Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise
Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"
My concern is that so much of what is going on with data centers in general ( and from what I have read, this one also ) is everything that is kept private from the communities. People need to stop acting like the people are not part of the government and don't have a say. We may elect representation, but we are still in charge.
It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.
Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.
I don't trust the datacenter side of the table at all. I don't trust their claims. I don't trust their numbers. We have myriad examples of their lies. Do we have any examples of them being good corporate citizens that offset this?
I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.
There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?
It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.
If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception
I think it's a proxy for something else. Data centers are associated with AI and the AI billionaires were seen with Trump and Musk has his own baggage. Data centers are apparently being built but unless you go look them up online, I doubt most people know where they are even (and I don't know if those maps are accurate). What will happen is the AI billionaires and tech will politically realign and then it suddenly won't be an issue anymore.
This comment section blows my mind! Are we that insulated from the world? Are these all bots? Am I crazy???
Tech is now viewed in the same lense as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"
Anytime I talk to anyone not in tech they're extremely sceptical of anything tech companies do. Most common reasons I hear as to why is greed, social media destroying children in many ways, seeking political power, and now many parents are concerned their child won't have critical thinking skills because AI is here to think for them.
I don't think they're crazy or obviously wrong. It breaks my heart to hear tech leaders chalk this all up to "AI has poor messaging" as if you say "Our lies have got to be better so we can make the public believe what we want". I've never seen tech so out of touch.
> Tech is now viewed in the same lens as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"
That's right, but consider what people would be saying about oil companies on Driller News. Thousands of users here have financial or ideological vested interests in the success of the current crop of tech companies. They can recognize the individual faults of the industry where it doesn't affect their primary interest - such as disliking social media, addictive design and so on - but when you start talking about THE tech golden goose, the criticism dies down.
Usually, people tend to care about what the overwhelming majority thinks, if only to remain informed. I guess branding all dissidents with a derogatory term of your choice and retreating back into the booster bubble is an alternate option.
That's fine if you want to sit alone in a basement playing with AI models, but the context here is politics and the wider business world. In those domains accounting for the thoughts and needs of other citizens isn't just the morally correct thing to do, it's required to have any sort of sustained success.
Data center companies had some initial wins utterly steamrolling local governments. They sent millionaire legal teams after part time city councils who didn't immediately cave to their demands and it worked for a time. But people notice that stuff, don't like, and will react.
You can ignore the world all you like, but if that's the attitude actual decision makers are going to take with AI things are going to get even worse for them, no matter how many demeaning insults they fling at their opponents.
Ideally the not-luddites, if they want to get anything done.
This argument of “you’re stupid and I’m not” is not a winning one. If you want naysayers to listen, you have to address their concerns. Not pretend their concerns aren’t valid.
What I’m learning from this comment section is that a lot of supposedly smart people have the reasoning and persuasion skills of small children. I mean, really guys?
You’ve told these people that this technology will destroy the labor market and their means of living and you’re actually shocked they might be a little skeptical? Really? Is your brain functioning okay? Did you take your medicine today?
Frankly, the Luddites have been more than generous and understanding with their perspective. The technocrats have been incredibly, unbelievably, unfathomably shit with their posturing and persuasion. Jesus Christ, get a grip.
It’s not name calling, it’s the truth. It’s not about your predictions or who “wins”, it’s about understanding and persuasion.
The biggest proponents of AI, the people who created it, who value it most, have stated again and again “this will ruin your life” “this threatens humanity” “you all will be out of a job”.
Do you think that messaging, from the people MOST OPTIMISTIC about AI, inspires confidence in… well… anyone?
Luddites are luddites because you, yes YOU, created them. People wouldn’t be Luddites if their lives weren’t threatened. Of course they’re Luddites!
And, for the record, I’m not a Luddite. I’m just not fucking braindead and understand that, if we want AI to go anywhere, we have to stop making it out to be a world-ending mayday situation.
If you tell people “this will ruin your life” then guess what? They won’t want to support that thing. Congratulations, you’ve just achieved the reasoning skills of the average American five year old.
Now can we all move on and stop sabotaging any sort of progress? The impediment to AI isn’t Luddites, it’s you. It’s AI proponents. Who can’t listen and who can’t understand that making enemies turns you into an enemy.
> This comment section blows my mind! Are we that insulated from the world?
Very much yes, and not on just this topic. I've said it many times over the years in contentious topics (and probably many more I didn't feel like jumping in on), HN is absolutely a filter bubble where most members can't even imagine they're in one.
The thing that gets me is why the hell are these things being powered with loud generators and fossil fuels? These facilities are billed as being 21st century technological marvels. But what's actually delivered looks like something out of the industrial revolution. Harvesting old jet engines from decommissioned planes in order to power your facility? You've got to be joking.
This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.
How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered? The only on-the-shelf low carbon tech with the reliability and deployability we need is nuclear. Any other discussion is just pointless.
> How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered?
A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.
I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.
Neither of those get to the carbon neutral point of the whole endeavor. Just more complicated steps to shuffle the deck chairs around. Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines. The costly part is a political and regulatory problem that is more easily solved than paving over all the farm land with solar panels or strip mining third world countries for lithium.
> Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines.
Oh I see, I didn't realize it was so simple. Let's meet back in a week and we can compare my backyard solar + battery demonstration to your nuclear demonstration.
This is a good example of feeling like I've been transported back in time. A time before people had an answer to the question: How can I use a computer if I've disconnected it from the grid? (I guess that takes us back to 1980)
For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout. If the US were a thinking nation, it would be trivial to ram through solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines. However, we all saw what happened when Massachusetts tried to build power lines to buy power from Hydro-Quebec, for example. It’s entirely a regulatory self own that AI capex is being spent on gas turbines instead of wind turbines.
> For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout.
That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it. From where I sit, a major criticism of the DC rollout has been the use of fossil fuels.
> That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it.
I dunno if it's for the most part or not, but it holds true in my experience.
In my home state, there has been a transmission line project planned for over a decade now to take wind power generated in the windy southern end of the state to bring it to the central metropolitan load center.
It's been basically tied up this entire time due to NIMBY. It just recently in the past year or so started to enter the next phase, just in time for the anti-datacenter folks to be added to the NIMBY allied cause to get it blocked again.
It might still happen, but overall green energy from where I stand is something everyone wants in someone else's backyard. In the state I currently live in rural folks protest the solar farms, and pretty much everyone everywhere protests the transmission upgrades required.
My whole life has been consumed with basically no one allowing anything to be built for any reason. It's getting tiring, so taking anti-datacenter concerns at face value is proving difficult to me. Even if I do logically understand many or maybe even most are being brought in good faith.
Polls won't really provide much value on the subject. Plenty of people will say they are in favor of green energy projects - until they are proposed near them.
Everything is kind of maxed out. The main guy going with jet engines is Musk who got in late after Altman et al had signed up most spare power. In a more sane world the government would regulate it but the current president doesn't seem keep apart from banning the term AI.
Did they reject data centers? Or did they represent the current ownership model behind data centers?
Tech “ownership models” have accelerated the separation of haves and have nots. I’ve wondered if datacenters were regulated such that they become public goods (libraries, power and water infra, etc), if the public would invest more agreeably in them.
And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.
Because tech has all the money and all the power these days. They do whatever they want with basically unlimited funds. Big tech has reshaped everything the internet used to be just because they can. Our entire workspace is getting reshaped and who is going to benefit the most? Large tech companies.
Most people feel like they have no say in anything that is going on because a handful of insanely large tech companies are just deciding the future for everyone, and it's in their own best interest- not the best interest of the poeple.
With more nuance, the oligarchs, shell companies, and wealth inequality that flourishes in less restricted capitalism. The hubris the winners demonstrate, and the belittling of economic losers, are also a significant factor.
Weird place for a lefty to come in. Top comment thread are center-left, you're deep in the euro right/libertarian end of a American centrist comment thread?
(Sorry, I compulsively read the comment history of the right/libertarians. The way their beliefs are glued together fascinate me in a way, it's fun to try to figure out where they are living to the municipal level .. the more one values privacy, the less one should have it, privacy is my "anti-right" of the month, I disagree violently with Acemoglu on free speech as well with somewhat parallel justifications )
> Weird place for a lefty to come in. Top comment thread are center-left, you're deep in the right/libertarian end of a centrist comment thread?
Weird place to come in and dissuade discussions between differing view points. This is at the root of our difficulty in finding compromise and ending the hyperbolic extremes on the left and right.
> I disagree violently with Acemoglu on free speech
In what sense? What is your perspective on his perspective and why it is wrong?
My gaps with Acemoglu et al re: "Building Pro-Worker Ai" is that there is handwaving at how we incentivize augmentation over full automation, and how new jobs and tasks are created.
You're right to try to bridge. But here I think it's too far.
Given that plenty of people voting Republican are also against datacenters, the first libertarians to try to reach for might be the self-funded low TAM business owners or local solopreneurs who actually value their privacy/independence (datacenters being an arm of the surveillance-industry complex)
Acemoglu, later. I need to distill my own thoughts on this, but it's roughly that speech channels should be regulated as a public good like datacenters
Are you familiar with Michael Sandel? The talks between him and Acemoglu are quite good.
> speech channels should be regulated as a public good like datacenters
Who decides what channels and what speech? My understanding is that Acemoglu believes algorithmic driving of speech (up or down) should be regulated, but not speech generally.
I'm playing around with an idea for "tickle up government" whereby local jurisdictions are free to do more experimentation and ideas that work out in practice get lifted up - as opposed to the top-down, domination based ideas coming from the far left and hard right.
No. Cursory questioning of Gemini seems to suggest that Sandel has thought more about the "economics of free speech as a public good". Cool.
>Who decides what channels and what speech?
I didn't phrase that properly. OP of this thread put that thought in my head. Example. Speech is "better" regulated here in HN than on X, Mastodon, Reddit what have you. The who are the mods of course. We have a more effective meritocracy here than USG, meaning tomhow is not too shabby either. But it is topdown
So. Trickle up version of meritocratic mod-selection? Seems like thats what some parts of Reddit do, know any specifics/subs?
"No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”
For those questioning this conclusion, 4 of top 10 states by GW of DC under development flipped parties and elected governors that made curtailing DC development or increasing regs part of their platform. That's 130GW of the ~350GW pipeline in the US.
This obviously matters. These states have the leverage. Look at the issues Oracle is having in NM.
The fact that Americans can be made to vote for NIMBY policies was well known. My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
As someone who grew up in a country with near zero growth (some would call it “sustainable growth”) and the resultant stagflation, I wouldn’t wish that feeling of growing into an economy where you can only aspire to take from others, on my worst enemies.
I agree with these voters on almost everything, from the need for more energy and water infrastructure to using this growth to pay for basic needs like healthcare. But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
It seems like we are habituating the American public to just reject that and hope it goes somewhere else (tm) while they get the gains and that’s not how this works.
I think that as an industry, we'll have to make the case persuasively that the datacenters won't hurt quality of life for nearby residents, that they'll have a positive influence on the local economy, and that even more broadly that the benefit from AI is shared and not captured by small group of the ultra wealthy.
That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.
I am not suggesting they will. That's a discussion between the communities and the datacenter developers. And the datacenter developers will have a track record they'll be able to stand behind with prior projects, or they'll have to explain why the harms were understated and the benefits were overstated.
For the record, I don't think this is necessarily a positive development for our field or the US. But the solution was one or two years in the past and involved more truthful and principled behavior by the companies developing these projects.
This election speaks for itself in terms of how the population feels about the matter.
>My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.
How are data centers replacing small businesses? That sounds like a politicians broken speech reader.
They’re literally bringing jobs and paying out the ass, the unions love em [1] and absolutely supercharging local tax revenue, just basic economic growth stuff.
Off the top of my head, copywriters, PR researchers, graphic designers, marketers, tutors.
This is the doublespeak that has the public so distrustful: value companies at billions and trillions of dollars based primarily on their ability to replace your workforce, then tell the workforce there will be no displacement. It's insults the intelligence of reasonable people.
Example; my son’s teacher uses AI to make new reading material (mostly graphics), he’s pretty good at keeping quality up and making things relevant to the kids’ real life. But critically without AI, he would not have otherwise hired an illustrator, this is wholesale new economic activity. Not a replacement.
Outside of marketing hype, this is what is mostly happening across the economy. No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
>No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
I don't really know what this means. If you need a concrete example, just look at Figma's product roadmap. Look at Fiverr. Your son's teacher is, generally, replacing demand for an educational product with direct production. There was a whole supply chain being replaced with an inference vendor. If you're saying that kind of production doesn't also use generative art, I think you're being very selective.
Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement. The explanation of job market contraction is also replacement. The electorate are responding in their own interests to what they are being told.
“ Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement”
That’s a headline read of the situation on the ground is what I’m saying. The frontline is a lot more complex than just a 1-to-1 replacement.
My sons teacher still regularly uses library books (that regularly buys published books), now he can just add a story about his cats visiting the firehouse, cats the kids have met, hyper personalized and made more relevant, a market created totally new and replacing nothing in place.
Figma is on a hiring spree, just FYI, to drive my point home. This is pure pie growth.
On the ground, I have definitely replaced peoples' income with AI spend. If you haven't, or aren't even aware of it having happened, I think we're coming from meaningfully different places.
Company with a growing market got a productivity improving technology and decided to reduce their headcount? That seems...counter productive. The natural response would be to get more customers and grow.
Short-termism is always a thing I guess, but these companies just end up hiring different people (who can use the AI better) down the line, which is in line with my conclusion.
> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.
> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
Maybe it looks like a reduction in monopolies, increased competition, lowering of prices as automation pays dividends, and a general de-consolidation of power.
It doesn't look like 4-companies owning the whole stock market and incumbents using AI to cut every worker they can with no longterm plan, using AI to deny insurance claims, and rig the deck in the most unconscionable uncompetitive ways they can.
There are outcomes much worse than "flat" if we aren't careful, and even the AI CEOs say as much.
I think this is missing the issue. It's not the cranes and walls that bother people, it's the tech companies. They've shown themselves repeatedly to be bad faith and exploitative actors. Now they're asking to move in. It's easy to understand why people are saying no.
And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but that should be highly counter-intuitive. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor; society entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive work as well as increase unemployment is quite likely. My prediction is based on 'what comes next' but if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month, this is all going to be, again understandably, seen as pie in the sky.
Let me translate this for how a person negatively affected by this is going to see what you're saying:
'We are regularly deceptive and unadulteratedly self interested. Now we're going to create a catastrophic problem for you, one that is reasonably likely to be unprecedented in scale, because we deem it to be profitable for us. But don't worry, we promise to throw you a bone in the future to make it a bit more tolerable. Deal?'
I can generally see any genuine viewpoint relatively easily, but I'm having a lot of differently understanding what could possibly lead you to view things like this. Do you genuinely not see that LLMs are very likely to cause significant damage to all forms of cognitive employment?
This outcome is exactly what's driving the multi-trillion dollar valuations. The idea is that companies will be able to eliminate much of their labor and replace it with LLMs, LLM companies will rug-pull and investors get rich(er). A nice way of phrasing this is 'increasing the productivity' of companies' remaining labor forces, but it's the same outcome regardless of framing.
My optimism comes from what happens after this, but there's a high probability of rough waters on the horizon for a very large chunk of the labor force, before we enter into a new equilibrium. Trying to imagine things are just going to stay roughly the same is, in my opinion, just not a realistic view at all, almost regardless of the assumptions you make.
And given how non-independent society is now a days, shaking things up like this will likely have an unprecedented impact, even if the shaking was probably more severe from previous revolutionary leaps.
I don’t deny the transition is rough, difficult and panic inducing . What I ask is for those of us who have historical perspective, we understand that this is just another productivity jump in a chain of many since the Industrial Revolution and that categorically over a decade we will all collectively be wealthier as has been proven time and again. There is zero evidence that “this time is different” just because it’s cognitive activities being automated.
With this historic perspective we know we’ve gotten through this before and we can do better this time. More generous unemployment benefits, better retraining methods, these are all on the table.
What we shouldn’t do is give in to panic populism. We live in a representative democracy not a direct one precisely so representatives can balance the needs for growth, innovation and real across the board wealth creation over a more popular stagnant jobs program.
Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well. The real catastrophe would have been banning electricity distribution grids even though that’s what the rioting lamplighters demanded.
You're all over the place. So right now you're agreeing that there will be a catastrophe which will be 'rough, difficult, and panic inducing.' And this is what people want to avoid, especially when the short-term to mid-term solution comes down to a mixture of relying on big tech and big government. I refuse to believe that you can't understand why people would do anything to avoid this. The companies deploying these buildings certainly do. There's a reason that a substantial chunk of the jobs created by datacenters involve guns!
Never used the word catastrophe, panic can be induced without one. But it doesn’t seem like this conversation is fruitful. Obviously people want things.
The people want zero taxes, 100% services and a $10,000 tax rebates. But turns out you can’t give them that. Stopping new technology diffusion so that panic isn’t induced is no different an ask.
I'm not trying to play gotchas. I'm trying to figure out what in the world your logic is and you seem to keep shifting it every single post. So now you're back to claiming it's nothing but defacto hysteria while in the post prior you were acknowledging that there would be widespread rough and difficult times, significant disruption to employment, and more.
Assuming you're human, this makes me think that you don't actually have any logic for your position and are instead ad hoc formulating an argument after picking a desired conclusion, rather than logically working your way to a conclusion.
It's not that complicated, if you see all help from the government as a "big government intervention" then yes, the thing you are panicking about will come true.
I don't think most people see it this way, and if we can expand government help to help people transition through career upgrades then the thing people are panicking about need not come true.
This is not going back and forth, there is real tumult, but damage can be avoided. And I think we should communicate that reality clearly instead of offering a public veto on all new technologies.
I just don't think you're engaging in good faith. You're now calling people getting forced out of their jobs and onto various government assistance programs a 'career upgrade' that's nothing to worry about. That's so absurdly out of touch that I refuse to believe anybody genuinely believes this.
I literally said retraining (you know..to get the upgrade).
Don’t think I’m the one arguing in bad faith.
Quoting myself again
“Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well. The real catastrophe would have been banning electricity distribution grids even though that’s what the rioting (see: “panicking”) lamplighters demanded”
PS: 90% sure you’re a troll bot mostly because you’re highly engaged with how I’m arguing as opposed to what I’m arguing. Just FYI for anyone else reading this.
I'm only engaged with what you're arguing. The problem is that it keeps overtly changing from post to post, often in mutually exclusive ways. And now you're leaning heavily into completely absurd euphemisms. Nobody's getting a career upgrade from this, let alone because of government programs. That's akin to telling coal miners go to learn to code. And again I refuse to believe any human would believe this.
Fortunately, unlike you, I have the empathy to understand other people's arguments, I know the concept of upskilling is:
a) counter-intuitive
b) change, and therefore scary.
But historically this has played out the exact same way and there is no evidence that it won't play out the same way with AI.
You're ignoring the examples I'm giving you (lamplighters), so I'll use yours: When automation came to coal mines, the coal miners became coal extraction machine operators.
I'm curious now how you'll claim again that I've "overtly changed" my argument: Change is hard, but can be managed.
Most of every humans knows that the issue for coal miners was not about better tools, but about their job being made obsolete, similar as what LLMs are already starting to do, and will likely do to a much greater degree in the future. Coal miners didn't become 'coal extraction machine operators' - they became unemployed.
Countless lives were completely destroyed in spite of 'government retraining' promises. Those who carried on managed to do through some menial labor and other jobs, many with even worse conditions and for worse pay. For instance trucking was a fairly common new profession - where you're away from family pretty much all the time, and getting paid even less. It's a horrible job, but it's the sort of work that was left for them.
I'm opposed to NIMBYism 99% of the time, but these data centers aren't being opposed for no reason. There's stories coming out all over the country of negative impacts on communities and backroom deals with local officials who sign NDAs during negotiations. There's a goldrush on in the US to build these out and when that happens companies run roughshod over communities.
Data centers take resources, land, and ways of life from rural communities to give economic growth opportunities to people in cities without paying those rural communities.
> But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
There is absolutely no need for cranes to show up in or near existing neighborhoods to build data centers. The US is not out of remote land that would be well suited for this purpose, but building in those places requires spending more money to build supporting infrastructure, so businesses prefer to avoid that cost.
If the growth is truly beneficial, it should be able to pay for itself, and I think that is what people want to see enforced.
Why are you upset that citizens have a right in how their communities are developed? Do you not understand that a majority of people do not care about helping capitalists get slightly richer and would rather have a life of quiet dignity?
Why should we believe that we will meaningfully benefit from that economic growth? We aren't benefiting much now. And if we won't benefit then why should we care about it?
Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone, and protecting the environment and ecosystems for long-term sustainability. I’m not even remotely convinced we need ‘number go up’ to make this happen - if anything, the hyper focus on “economic growth” seems to run counter to equity and sustainability.
“ Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs”
As I pointed out, I lived in a country that answered this question exactly like you wanted. It was like living in a country where every institution from the college to the coffee shop was the DMV. It works..just about. But it sucks.
I think you’re conflating a lot of things here - economic growth (or lack thereof), highly developed infrastructure, my idea of a society focused on “meeting real human needs”, and probably more.
Honestly, I don’t know what more to say than my original question: What do you even mean by “economic growth”? Unless you define that, we’re all going to be talking past each other. It’s not obvious (at least to me) that any mainstream definition of “economic growth” has much to do with poor institutions, particularly once those institutions are developed.
Most businesses (and institutions in general) have more customers tomorrow than they do today, thats economic growth to me. If that doesn't happen, they stagnate, stop investing, innovating and moving forward. The internal incentives get weird and lopsided, lots of infighting starts, and generally all processes slow down (see; DMV).
There is simply no way to "meet real human needs" without economic growth.
You can to a certain extent take from one and give to the other to meet some needs, but that's it, you're just cutting tinier and tinier slivers of a pie that as you specifically said has stopped growing.
> Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone,
For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.
Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.
Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.
Does economic growth look like companies firing hundreds or thousands of employees in batches because they are replacing them with AI? Because that's what people are seeing in headlines. That and mass surveillance.
There are a set of data centers that got built where local laws were (and continue to be) broken. Messaging from the data center builders is that accepting their will is inevitable and they are above regulation. Given these, it is an entirely reasonable position to ask for a complete halt.
This doesn't happen when UPS opens a distribution center or CVS opens a store because everybody knows UPS and CVS are bound by local laws. That cannot be said of e.g. SpaceX, so the only play is to keep them out, full stop. Nobody wants a neighbor who is above the law.
This will encourage developers to put these facilities in more human-friendly places. I knew the clock was ticking when xAI started expanding aggressively in suburban Memphis. These facilities are loud, they emit pollution (when power is generated onsite), and they need very little staff. After the initial construction there is zero upside for the local community. They should be located away from population centers.
more likely they'll get built in different countries with more lax regulations. This is probably going to end up like manufacturing where it's all done overseas.
Property taxes are a significant contributor to the purse of many cities and counties, and datacenters are expensive real estate in terms of the assessed valuations. Sales tax also.
For some cities and counties this will be a loss if those developments move.
Not appreciably in most municipality so far, I guess what your saying is nice in theory but isn't being born out in reality in the simple majority of places.
I would take a wild guess that data centers have a pretty mediocre assessed value, and of course they have even less of an employment base than a typical warehouse or factory.
In some states (Texas) data centers are getting significant tax breaks. I (in Texas) on the other hand have seen my property tax rise about 700% in the last 10 years.
I’m a progressive through and through, but this is the one aspect of the whole platform I don’t like. I am in the build data centers everywhere, make tokens dirt cheap, and work as hard as possible to make models more and more intelligent camp. The only thing I would like to see is that we keep building massive data centers, but mandate that they have to be powered by their own newly built solar, wind, and battery banks. This would let us keep our lead in frontier models, as well as building out brand new sources of green energy. I believe Massachusetts (?) has already passed legislation that accomplishes this.
Unfortunately the hyper scalers decided to aggressively shoot themselves in the foot by following the Amazon HQ2 approach of making cities compete and signing deals in the dark under NDA. They became symbols of grift and corruption and undemocratic strip mining of communities for resources because they figured they could culture war their way out of any consequences. It's very stupid because there's no way this is worth it financially for them given how much backlash it generated. Given how hyped unions were/are about data center construction just showing up as a good neighbor and not being an asshole would have kept public support but somehow they didn't realize how much the generally positive impressions of tech the public used to have were worth in soft power and just how much value they were throwing into the trash by nuking it.
I saw first hand the Port Washington, Wisconsin data center build and spoke to a guy working on the project. As he points out, the pay is the best he's ever had, but as construction is always boom and bust, he was under no illusion that it would last forever.
Dump truck divers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, and many other construction trades were benefiting within a 2-hour radius of the site.
Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities. Clearly they must be built correctly, but the cash injection to workers pockets must be a welcomed addition to local families.
> Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities.
When the data center is built and the dump trucks leave, what is the ongoing benefit for that community?
What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development with similar land and resource use? It seems to me that datacenters have low ongoing employment requirements compared to those resources used, and that many of the benefits of running the datacenter aren't gained by the local community but rather by businesses located far away.
> What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development
Is there another group that's lining up to build stuff on that land? Should nobody ever be allowed to build on any land unless it's being used to the maximum possible utility?
He should be asking permission from the city council and state before doing any change in his garden or house. He must not add a new light in his bedroom without first going through a city wide vote.
It is not as if data center development is suddenly ended. Democrats have paired up with tech in the past. Tech might want to make friends with those that hold the purse stings. Regulatory capture is still in the cards. Projects on the way are still on the way.
It might be that tech would like some regulations / laws that slow data center development (maybe a good thing) if they think it has just turned into an arms race that has gotten out of hand. Investors might think this also (S&P 500 up ~1.5% as I write this).
I am a little hopeful here in Texas. We have needed change for a while. Still, we are talking about politicians and while there maybe be a mandate from voters it is a long and narrow road to solutions that are good for everybody (especially the constituents).
The nice thing about politicians is they can be held accountable by constituents, per the Constitution.
Data center developers, who should be equally distrusted (but seem to get a pass), are not beholden to you.
It will take developers and politicians working together to find a solution, rather than let developers do whatever they can to maximize profits without regulation or public process.
And while before you could say well money overrules everything, they outspendint Democrats like crazy and still got wiped out. So if you want to keep your job as a politician suddenly more fundraise no longer means more advantage
But the money was going to the Republicans, who did what they were told. The money may not actually win the election but it can (not always, but it looks like often) buy politicians.
Yeah, and both their politicans and constituencies were directly betrayed by them. They made their bed and now they must sleep in it. Many of the dems who won made data centers and AI a part of their platfrom.
Negative sentiment on data centers is bipartisan. It’s incredibly strong right now.
Regulatory capture won’t save the tech industry if they can’t improve public sentiment.
They’ve been talking down to the average person, doom-bragging about the existential crisis of AI to juice investors, and people like Sam Altman have been generally been acting like Bond villains.
I think their shortsightedness has backed them into a corner of a potentially highly regulated environment where building a data center is harder than building a chemical plant.
> Majorities of Democrats (69%), Republicans (54%) and independents (53%) oppose new local data centers. Opposition is highest among young adults under 30 (70%) and declines to 57% among those 65 and older, the inverse of what one might expect for a new technology
I guess it’s possible that it could be turned partisan, and in that case it’s not a non-sequitur. I just see it as less likely than with Occupy Wall Street.
I’m not sure that the right is currently able to offer an offramp for people with frustrations or opposition to data centers like the Tea Party offered for Occupy Wall Street.
I also see it as an issue where their construction overwhelmingly impacts red districts, since they tend to be built where land is cheap where suburbs border rural areas.
Mostly yes. Everyone would also prefer that steel mills semiconductor fabs get built somewhere else, where they personally don't have to deal with any of the externalities.
I don't know why people voted for this. Probably something to do with all the big tech CEOs visibly paying bribes and tribute to the corrupt and massively unpopular president. I doubt the anti-data-center backlash is as extreme without that.
But also just NIMBY. No one likes to live near industry.
To get this big a backlash, you need a variety of reasons to oppose that appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Inevitably some of those reasons will be silly (a lot of people talked themselves into voting for a 2nd term for Trump, after all!).
How do the jobs and local economic benefit compare between a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, and a datacenter?
Are companies proposing steel mills and semiconductor fabs directly adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods?
Will those developments pay for the required infrastructure expansions, or get special deals to waive those costs in return for building in that community?
That's what happens when you are building something too fast and affects negativity the local economy. I personal doubt this data centres are really the issue. But we got what we paid for.
FUD spread from competing nation states is where it all originated from. Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began. If you live in a medium to large city goto google maps and search for "datacenter" in your town, i bet you live within 5 miles of one that you've never even noticed before.
There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.
edit: let me add that the price of natural gas in TX is effectively zero.. or may even be negative. There's plenty of energy available. Now, availability of turbines to convert those chemical bonds to eletricity is another matter but the gas is there.
The true price of gas power production is the externalized cost of its emissions, which is currently not reflected in the market price but instead paid for by all of humanity.
Natural gas power production is by far the cleanest and most available for this use case. Nuclear would be better but can't be brought online fast enough. Solar/Wind would be best but there's not enough yet either and behind the meter generation isn't even feasible. All things considered, natural gas is the best fit.
> Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began
That's because before the AI race began (1) no one was trying to build more data centers in a couple years than had previously been built in the entire history of civilization, and (2) the new data centers are an order of magnitude bigger than pre-AI race data centers.
Also (3) the people involved in those data centers were not also constantly bragging that they would use the data centers to replace everyone's job guy for pennies on the dollar.
I'm sure there was a "spray and pray" attitude, but also some stunning incompetence... Republican PACs spent a lot of money advertising for a candidate who was running in Portland, Maine... in Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country.
Although public opinion is against it, the opposing voices within public opinion are also different.
It's impossible to satisfy everyone, and there must be trade-offs, but when it comes to exactly how the details should be handled, it seems that everyone can't reach a consensus either.
But I'm very curious, if all the construction were moved to other countries, what would public support be like then?
Currently, part of the reason for construction in various states comes from "Made in America."
For example: TSMC (sorry, I'm Taiwanese).
I'm not very sure, but I hope to hear more voices.
US is happy to ship toxic manufacturing, and even plain old garbage, offshore. They wouldn't bat an eye at DCs moving.
I wonder which enterprising Caribbean country will figure out how to make data-sovereignty laws attractive such that no one cares about data moving outside of the US.
Darn right! Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone can see any value in this, except those at the top. Yes, LLMs make us more efficient in SOME cases, but does that improve life for the average man or even average programmer? Or even the end user, who has to deal with more AI-generated ads and scams now?
The only end benefit seems to be that more people can make more software now, and it's not even clear that this will be a good thing in the long run, considering how much technical debt we're accumulating.
That hundreds of hackers can complete a few neat hobby projects doesn't really count as a serious benefit, by the way.
If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?
For a random non-software example: My mother has an HR job and absolutely loves it for working with spreadsheets, sorting through email, making mail merges, reviewing the policy documents for errors as she works on them, and so on. She spends less time in document hell and more time getting things done or talking to people.
Personally, I find the ability to quickly remove technical debt to be more practically valuable than the ability to quickly create software. A lot of the smaller shops I work with never had the time or money to properly manage, update, or retire their infrastructure. Now many are in a better shape than my own stuff has been because you don't need to be an uber nerd spending a weekend to upgrade an ancient & neglected MediaWiki box (or whatever) anymore.
> If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?
I only added it because I don't consider that use case a valid exception and I'm just anticipating that sort of comment.
Overall I do believe it is a productivity win for software. However, the insane amount of money spend on AI (training models, building datacenters and even usage in some cases) is ridiculous. Hopefully that will get lower soon.
In the past few weeks, I have used AI assistance to...
...track down a piece of music I wanted to hear again, based on a description of its general vibe and the single line of the lyrics I could remember
...compare the weather resistance between various models of temporary carport
...figure out how to get the last stubborn bolt out of a snowmobile engine I was trying to remove (hidden underneath, behind a covered access panel, it turned out)
...design a costume I want to make, from a vague concept through inspiration pieces to specific details to a complete design sketch I can use to draft the sewing pattern
...apply a voice-over to a piece of video using kdenlive
...find a replacement ATV master cylinder which is cheaper than the OEM part
...fix an annoying string buzz on a mandolin
...locate the procedure for getting the city to plant a street tree in front of the house
...recommend a show I haven't seen which would fit the mood I was in
...make a recipe for a dish I wanted to cook, combining elements from two different variations I found online, modified to accommodate the ingredients I actually had
...evaluate all the second-hand welders available on the local craigslist based on their suitability for a certain project I want to tackle
...plan a last-minute night out in a city I don't know very well
...find replacement glass to fit a ceiling light fixture, from a picture of what I had and a description of what I wanted instead
...suggest some music not already in my library which would fit in with a certain playlist
...find out how parking works at an airport I was about to visit
...figure out why my motorcycle wasn't starting reliably
...find a plumber capable of solving an issue with an antique clawfoot tub
...learn how to assemble a DIY meshcore radio kit which came with no instructions, by taking pictures of the parts
I could continue, but I believe the point is made.
I think what we're seeing is that a lot of people wonder, if making the lives of wealthy people with a lot of leisure time more convenient is worth the societal tradeoff (even if they're in this category themselves)
I don't understand what you mean; which wealthy people are you talking about and what does their convenience have to do with the general utility of AI tools? The person I responded to seemed to think that AI tools were only useful for developing software, which struck me as a limited perspective.
AI is the next evolution to youtube university and will enable people to own homes that were previous not able to because of the skill needed to fix them. Help them repair their car and lower the ever growing bills for autoshops. The list goes on and on.
I don't think building huge datacenters to make a priveleged person like yourself have an even easier life is a worthy use of all the energy and space that could be used for wild nature.
They won't, because we'll still have no money to pay for healthcare as a result of AI taking our jobs. To the contrary, right now the rational choice is to not allow these AI farms to be installed so that many of us (this is not only about the US) still have access to a decent lifestyle (including decent health, that is).
AI should be owned collectively and we should all benefit from the loss of jobs. It was trained on our data and has no value without our labor, so it is our rightful property.
Unfortunately people have no difficulties having completely contradictory and absurd views. Understanding of the concept of a supply chain or dependency web is also quite weak.
A lot of noise, pollution, resource usage, power sound problems etc can be easily solved. The one that I think people are frustrated is the wealth inequality and data centers are directly seen as making few people insanely rich while their lives are not improving whatsoever. I don't see a solution to this yet.
What can be done about the noise? I keep thinking about this meeting in Carroll County, KY about 1 week ago where residents confronted county officials by playing recordings of the data center noise ongoing onside their homes. [0][1]
> “You guys have made your point, okay,” Nab tells the local residents.
> “But we have to live with this now!” they urgently respond.
> “Oh, ya have to live with it?” Nab shoots back, smirking as he speaks.
> “Yes we do!” the locals reply, as other townies chime in. At one point, a security guard jumps in and warns everyone to act like “adults.”
The near open mocking of residents as they grapple with persistent noise is what bends me the wrong way.
Some of them are bringing their own power no? My point is, I can see possible ways to solve this. The only thing we cannot solve easily is how it creates wealth inequality
Has anyone done an analysis of how these laws are defining "data center"? Anyone accidentally ban having a rack of servers on an office closet? That could suck for a lot of small businesses. I'm all for local autonomy, but knee jerk local laws can also be... messy.
I haven't seen a broad analysis, but every specific one I've looked into accounted for your concern and defined some sort of minimum size or power draw.
They never do that in the "first round". Usually you gotta wait for a compliance industry to spring up and then they inevitably lobby for the definition of people who need to pay the compliance industry to get watered down. It's just the natural incentive creep of the system.
I would be surprised if a rack of servers in an office closet could realistically draw 25 megawatts of energy, which is generally the cutoff that these local ordinances use to define a "data center". Keeping in mind that the cost of commercial electricity alone for powering even a 1 megawatt data center continuously for 1 month would have to be at least 100,000 dollars, right?
Laws are public, you are welcome to go read them. All of the ones I've read define it based on [x] megawatt of compute or similar. None of them are banning a rack of servers in a closet.
Getting people to vote against building anything is easy, of course when people start complaining about lack of housing, or a failing economy its quite a bit more challenging for them to recognize how regulation (that they may have voted for) led to those issues.
Anything with a whiff of data centers were squashed. Here in Rhode Island there were rumors that the economic development ballot question was so vague that it could end up being a data center.
From my time at hyperscalers ... realistic for low power traditional DC (lot of regular rackmount CPU server) ... unrealistic for the power and cooling requirements of inference and crypto mining
Many of the votes are not full ban on DC but ban on massive energy dense DC
If datacenters in space becomes a thing, we will then learn that the rockets that launch them release neurotoxins into the air, and call for an immediate moratorium on rocket launches.
Anyone with the care to pay attention to what is going on realizes that the pushback on DCs has nothing to do with DCs, and everything to do with fear about AI.
I had an electric bill of $200 before an AI Data Center was built near me; after that, I got a $559 electric bill. Some people turned off the power to their old house for sale and got a $250 electric bill. People seem to think the Data Center is not paying its fair share of electricity and is passing the costs on to households.
We had a clown running in our local election who had "no data centers" on their election signs. The area they were running to control is the last place you would ever want to put a data center. This clown won. Politicians use this to fool stupid people.
Yep same as GOP using trans panic, women in men's sports, Haitians eating cats and dogs, gender reassignment surgery in schools. These things aren't real issues but it works.
The difference is that these AI data centers use significantly more power on a per-rack basis (and thus requiring much bigger backup generators) and generate much more heat (requiring much more cooling) than the data centers of old.
* We've built a technology that has obliterated entry level hiring
* That technology might obliterate all the other "normal" person white collar jobs. The kinds of jobs you can clock in and out and not think about them outside of that. Instead, every new job will be a managerial one working with 500 agents.
* Loaning all the money to build these data centers and train these models costs so much it cranks rates through the roof, so we've frozen the real estate market and nobody can move or buy in
* The past 10 years of American politics have been defined by how the last time we did a broad replacement of labor event like that for a group of people. Their standard of living permanently shrunk (the NAFTA disrupted working class), and we may end up doing that to you guys again. The only solution is that the government is going to have to do some sort of UBI or redistribution (which the last time they did during COVID, it was followed by the greatest inflation we've seen in our lifetimes)
* This technology might literally destroy the world in the next 10 years, and we keep accidentally releasing it into the world like its Skynet. But we are not responsible for it, and by the way its unavoidable with this technology. Somewhere on the other side, utopia will arise (No really your standard of living will actually go up after losing your job this time unlike everyone else, trust me.)
Then half the people in this thread is smugly are acting baffled at why people don't want this, and going "Hey they don't know that much about data center logistics but still oppose this. What is up with that?." Forget about if a data center actually ends up being a net drag if its near you and the standard nimby stuff. Even if it weren't, what benefit does marching towards this future have for anybody not in the top 10%? Sure, you can make a bunch of economic theory arguments: growth is always good, stagflation, Luddites, etc. But in practice, economic advancement and technology over the past 30 years has advanced so fast people can't even comprehend it, and in return everybody is becoming stupider, more unhappy, polarized, and the median standard of living has dropped as rich people have 20x their net worth. Why would a normal person want more of this?
Exactly. The most baffling thing about the backlash is how shocked the tech boosters are at it. I know tech can be a bubble, but it's stark to see just how out of touch people inside can be.
Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better. They are deeply skeptical that future gains will be freely shared with them rather than horded by a few tech oligarchs. Based on pretty much all of modern history, they're right to be skeptical.
This is apparently incomprehensible to many AI proponents, but many people would genuinely rather live next to a farm than a data center. They don't care that you can vibe code a hobby project or a jira ticket 10x faster than before. They do want cheaper utilities and a secure economic position, and they are well aware that AI is providing the opposite for them.
> Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better.
Most people's lives in tech have been made worse, not better, by AI. We have threads on the regular where people complain that they hate their jobs now that it turned into babysitting an LLM writing code. And those are the people most predisposed to be excited about new tech. It should be completely unsurprising to anyone paying attention if people outside tech hate AI.
The current framing of US politics is basically "vote for us because the other party is an existential threat" and data center proponents have adopted a similarly retarded position "we have to build data centers or China wins."
For this framing to work, you need a base of reliable supporters already all-in on your cause regardless of how you actually perform, and the data center proponents have done virtually everything imaginable the last four years to drive people away. Why AI investors are shocked (shocked) is really beyond explicable reason; American on both teams have never responded well to this kind of brain-dead gambit.
Thats the only good thing to come out of this. The rest of it really highlights how we acrewed up violating personal liberty with overly agressive zoning and other regulation.
We decided back during the 1930s that it explicitly isn't how the market should work, because having the entire economy crash (which is what the AI bubble bursting would mean at this point) is a bad thing for most people. This is why America - and indeed any country except perhaps Somalia - doesn't have a free market, but a regulated market.
yes, happened under both a red and blue administration. It was the perfect example to show that political party is meaningless when it comes to financial bailouts.
People cared about TARP because these were companies managing their retirements and banks holding their savings. They had been around for 100 years+ and many had branches in their hometown.
Very few people know, or care, about AI companies in any way.
If AI companies go bust so will those retirements accounts (and the economy) So I think it is likely that AI companies will be bailed out when the bubble bursts.
I guess the lesson multinationals learned from the 2008 financial crisis is that if you fail is better to fail really really really big.
Tech stocks, and stocks in general, are overwhelmingly held by wealthy people who are way more exposed to crash than working class folks. The median retiree is much more reliant on social security and safe investments than they are on NASDAQ. Even if a few big tech companies go to zero it will only have a modest impact on their finances.
Obviously there would be knock on effects of a major crash that are hard to predict, but people inside the AI bubble wildly overrate how invested most Americans are in their success.
Not at all. The reasonable democrats will be forced to clean this mess (and Iran) while spending their newly found political capital and pissing off their base.
AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.
And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.
Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.
Democrats have participated in previous bailouts, I don't see why they wouldn't participate in this one. Especially given that the "it" in your "let it burn" scenario isn't AI companies, it's the economy.
The Republican party has changed so much since 2008 it's almost unrecognizable. Don't assume that the current Democratic party is the same as it was then.
The scale of the market fuckery is incredible. We are trying to install an MR scanner. Chillers are becoming hard to get and on long back order. The supplier says that the units we want are not really the right units for data centres but due to shortages of the units data centres really want, they are picking up alternatives.
It just shows the utter hollowing out of the US industrial base to me.
Everything has been cut to the bone so any blip in demand cannot - at any price - be effectively responded to. Even if you were exceptionally good at being able to double internal capacity, the supply chain all the way from raw materials to skilled labor pool your vendors may need just isn’t there.
This latest datacenter bubble is just the last and most acute symptom of this problem I’ve noted in my lifetime. Hyper-financialization does that to an economy.
The best anyone can do is outbid peter to rob paul.
Consider that semiconductors are the worst case situation for a supply chain planner:
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
This sub-thread wasn't about semiconductors though. It was for chilling plant. Semiconductors I do agree are a somewhat special case - but also one the US ceded it's capability in and largely offshored.
But it's way more than just chillers. It's everything from structural steel, to electrical transformers, copper cabling, optical transceivers, electric generation, skilled workforce in the trades, etc.
Overall this boom has been relatively tiny as far as US industrial booms historically have been, and we cannot ramp up production even if there was the political will to do so.
It's not just datacenters. Look at the military industrial supply chain these days. We can't even scale up WWII era artillery shell production in any reasonable timeframe. Much less modern weapons systems.
This is completely unsurprising. Data centers are the epitome of the phrase "Privatize profits, socialize costs."
It's amazing to me that no matter how seemingly "smart" tech oligarchs are, they don't realize that you actually have to incentivize people to do the things you want by making it benefit THEM. You can't just go "Oh, this is good for society so you need to take one for the team!" Nobody believes that BS anymore. When have the oligarchs themselves ever "taken one for the team?"
Now they will just need to build datacenters in more remote areas, and pay for the infrastructure themselves. Personally I've always been a fan of building them on old oil rigs or stuff like that because there's no point in wasting fresh water to cool these things when seawater is almost as good.
But my main takeaway remains that it's just wild how BAD tech oligarchs are at understanding the psychology and motivations of the public. You'd think that when a group of voters can absolutely destroy you and everything you worked for just by passing the right legislation, you'd put in some effort to understand their mindset and incentives. But these people seem to spend all their time in their own echo chambers. Maybe in a twist of irony, their social media algorithms tell them only want they want to hear so they have no idea how much the general public hates them.
its going to bring a fraction of the jobs they are projecting. and just most jobs will be temp/ contract just to build the damn thing. after its built it 90%+ related to the project will be out of job and likely leave your town (best case)
They’re probably inevitable anyway. Nobody likes to live near any kind of industry. For me as a kid that was dairy farms. Fucking horrible. Nobody lining up to close them down though. Hog farms are also terrible. Chickens I can imagine too, never seen one personally though.
Even something relatively innocuous like an orange grove. Rented a house in one before. Peaceful most of the time, free citrus. But when it got too cold they’d burn diesel in these little tower things and run a wind machine (like a giant reverse windmill) that was loud as fuck all night.
Had some relatives that lived near some kind of paper pulping plant. Guess if that sucked or not?
Now that I think about it, the local environment not smelling like absolute shit is probably a relatively recent development.
Pretty much. Mushroom farms smell like shit when the wind turns. Even just normal farms smell like manure at various times of the year. Amazon fulfillment centres are hideous and create a lot of traffic in the surrounding area. There's a reason building industry near residential in the SimCity series causes residential property values to drop.
I lived near mega diaries and oil fields growing up. Depending on the wind you either smelled manure or sulfur. People used to say "smells like money" because ag and oil were the source of jobs in the area.
I also believe they’re inevitable. Capital will find places without opposition and build them. There are thousands of jurisdictions in the US and capital usually wins.
I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.
We have so much vacant industrial land in the rust belt (so-called "brownfields"), with good access and utility infrastructure, why not build the data centers there? Why do they need to go on farmland in the countryside?
Places like Gary, IN should be courting them. Great access, on a huge lake so water is no issue, not in a hurricane or earthquake zone, and they desperately need people/companies paying property taxes.
The sad reality is neither sides' politicians care. Conservatives opened the doors for the elitists, now the liberals come in and close the door behind them, ensuring no other competitors get in. This "Dems vs Reps" opposition portrayed in the media is really just a clandestine partnership. And the general public falls for it every time.
Unless you're really ideology driven there's very few things that can be built around your neighbourhood (especially in a suburb) that will make it more valuable or pleasant to live. NIMBY is just not wanting to lose things.
Data centres have no real reason to be built in anyone's backyard. To prove it I'll just say that some of the guys that want to put it in your backyard, also ponder putting it in space.
Forgive my ignorance, but how would the current data center proposals "economically benefit their children"? It seems like a local land concession that would benefit a national economy, but hardly do anything long-term for the locality where the data center is built (maybe ~100 jobs and some property taxes).
Not sure where you've been but US productivity has skyrocketed since adoption of AI and this productivity increase has not been replicated in jurisdictions slower to adopt AI. This pushes up wages, decreases costs etc.
That's aside from the build-out jobs.
Anyone who works anywhere close to data center build including construction, networking, sysadmin is cleaning up right now. Their wages have doubled and demand is huge.
Maybe it is 100 permanent jobs, but that's huge for a small community, and the thousands of temporary jobs make an impact, too.
The high-level solution, though, is to stop concentrating housing and all the supporting infrastructure. NIMBY is a positive force in that regard.
The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.
BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.
I'm curious how you can square spreading infrastructure/housing around with the impact of climate change. It seems like the answer through that lens is to drive sustainable urban planning, not to move further towards suburban sprawl & car-centric culture.
are data centers profitable, or are there currently a ton of hopes and dreams filled by outrageous investments that will bring down the economy if/when the bubble bursts? i am worried that it's the latter, but i have no clue and it feels too stupid to be true. are they actually making a profit?
You're all "missing the forest for the trees" here, in that the end goal of these "AI data centers" is to put us all out of work and replace us with machines so that the already filthy rich can (somehow) get even richer. Apparently we'll all continue to buy their products and services somehow even after we're all fired because a machine can now do our job. None of it makes any sense when it comes down to it, but nobody's got the guts to come right out and say "The Emperor's not wearing any clothes!"
The narrative consistently in all the advertisement was that there was some sort of “loophole, which would allow politicians to lower the income threshold at any point without needing a vote”. I probably heard that statement over a thousand times in the past couple months.
That and even Gavin himself got on the pulpit to preach how it was poorly drafted and shouldn’t be passed. I legitimately don’t think I saw a single person or advertisement for it, you’re the first.
i'm not cheering or crying because of the results but curious about what happens next, I guess ready or not, into the future we go! Do me a favor and right down the 10 things promised to you by the people you voted for and put it an envelope to open 2 years from now at the next election. I think that's a worthwhile exercise and asked my kids (17 and 14) to do the same since they were both super tuned in to the election and have their own opinions.
They don't care about water moron, they just hate Musk and his kind and they hate AI. Rightly so. People are taking back the power. Fuck you and fuck your stock price
Data centers are the way of the future. We can either embrace them or fall behind places like China. I definitely think they should pay their own way 100%, but for God's sake, look at the big picture. Everyone uses AI in some way or another every day.
We can only hope this trend will continue from defense to offense, actively punishing AI companies and their leaders for the harm they have inflicted and continue to inflict on society.
I say this out of genuine curiosity: does Florida even make sense for data centers with the increasing weather patterns there? Feels like every time I read news about Florida, if it’s not political, it’s some natural disaster.
I assume there must be companies doing things like this there but would the big co’s actually want anything there?
I just used Florida for one counter example but Tennessee and Alabama just rolled out the red carpet, as results have come in, too. The usual course of things like this is the corporations will play different jurisdictions off each other to get more and more off taxpayers dime like pro sports stadiums and Amazon heralded HQ2 - thankfully voters in a lot of states mentioned rejected unlimited data centers - but it is not universal. The fight continues.
US voters will do absolutely anything but stop using the apps and technology from Big Tech that are powered by these data centers. It's always hilarious when someone shows me a Reel or TikTok about how they hate data centers. Often, they will also send off an AI response on why data centers are problematic. They are completely oblivious or knowingly ignorant.
So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it.
I think they're saying that "data centers" have become a totem, where people believe that rejecting datacenter development projects will solve problems that cannot be solved this way. I've encountered more than one person who thinks, for example, that if we just ban datacenters there will be no powerful AI systems so we won't need to study their capabilities and risks in detail.
You don't need to have the correct reason for making the correct decision. What rejecting data centers will do is slow down the obscene excessive demand for more memory being taken off the consumer market, even if just a little bit. It will force AI models to become more efficient within their resource constraints instead of sucking up all the air in the room.
Sure. But it's risky to let people make correct decisions for incorrect reasons, because they may react in very silly ways when their goals aren't achieved. If the populist tide turns onto memory companies ("stop making AI chips!"), and a widely supported protest encampment blocks Micron's new fabs, that's going to increase your memory woes more than datacenter moratoriums helped them.
pretty sure the traffic lights you use on the road rely on data centers. sames goes for the buses and trains you may or may not use. The weather report too.
A ridiculous gotcha on a site where every other article is about using AI to automate your job, solve frontier math problems, or port old video games to new platforms. So to be clear nothing is our fault here? It's all just about the billionaires "making us" use AI for all these things?
If my government just decided to wire $1B account into my personal account without strings attached I'd 100% accept that in ecstasy. So if I say "spending money this way is unfair" I'm a hypocrite???
Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical?
I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit?
The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!
The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that.
I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about democracy lately. The average voter will ask for a grab bag of contradictory things and then complain about attempts to deliver any one of them. My local subreddit wants cheap housing but also wants to preserve farmland and maintain historic buildings and welcome more immigrants at the same time.
My gripe is less with democracy and more with the ad-driven economy that has taken over.
The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.
There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.
Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and petulance.
Common pattern:
"I'm campaigning against A."
"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."
"I don't care!"
The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.
We live in a system wherein our survival is gate kept by oligopolistic technology, energy, and health insurance corporations.
One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.
Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.
A lot of people here are portraying the opposition to data centers as being uneducated hypocrites who are against anything getting built. When you look at what the opposition are saying, they generally know what they are talking about. Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.
Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...
Yea, a lot of the opposition is around these deals being cut at 3:00 in the morning in secret meetings in a shady, smoke-filled room, deliberately avoiding public input and scrutiny. Even if it's not grift and corruption, it certainly looks like grift and corruption.
It it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
Seeing multiple data centers sprouting up all over rural Ohio on a recent drive across the state was quite jarring. All of a sudden there are like ten massive cranes and a dozen huge turbines sitting in the middle of a field of corn and soy. It may me understand a lot better why people in the area hate them.
Especially when coupled with electricity rates basically doubling since the buildout started.
what percentage of farm land do you think is now datacenter?
I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing. Right now their sales pitch is basically we know it might suck having a data center in your backyard and it's a major bummer that any product involving a computer chip is vastly more expensive for the first time ever, but on the other hand our new AI technology is going to take your job and maybe destroy humanity.
I'm sure these guys aren't dumb, but they certainly act pretty dumb. What really solidified it for me was the choice they made to build data centers literally right next to neighborhoods and then run incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7. Even if they were legally allowed to do that, how they did they imagine it would go explicitly signalling that they couldn't give two shits about people living in the community? It's definitely some combination of incompetence and hubris to not predict the resulting backlash.
> I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing.
It won't. These people are fully convinced that literally everyone but them are all just clueless morons pushing back against their godlike infallible genius because we're all jealous of their wealth and power.
> isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them
Welcome to NIMBY
More "Not in any backyard until deal structures are guaranteed to respect the gross asymmetry of participants, but at that point reasonable so let's establish those structure guarantees with federal leverage sooner than later"
In other words, welcome to NIABUDSAGTTYGAOP, BATPESLETSGWFLSTL
But I get how that's not as fun to engage with for pithy internet rhetoric.
As a California resident, this is like Deja Vu.
“Nono, I’m not NIMBY, I just want to set up some goalposts that I can arbitrarily move whenever I want. I just want veto power. Trust me, I’ll use it responsibly”
Decades of no housing follows
I just accept that I'm NIMBY. It's a good thing.
Aren't the consequences of no new housing much worse than the consequences of no new datacenters?
NIMBY-ism will have the same effect on compute it had on housing. Only the rich will have access.
Actually the datacenter boom is already making it so only the rich have access, and the rest of us can maybe rent a little. Prices out a new box lately?
Right, gotta build more, we’re way down on the supply curve.
That’s my point.
building more datacenters will make computer compontents ... cheaper?
... you sure about that one chief?
Yes I forgot the supply of computer components is totally fixed and can’t be changed /s
The supply of computer components in the next few years is in fact fixed and cannot be changed.
After that, when more Litography machines have been built and facilities constructed, that may change. But even then I don't see how this will reduce component prices below the pre-AI-boom numbers? Chip production was already very efficient and already had very good economies of scale. Any attempt to ramp up production quickly will just lead to higher costs in facility construction, that need to be recouped. (Unless AI is a bubble that bursts, at which point components will be cheap, but only for a moment)
You’re making the case against infrastructure spending to meet demand needs in general. Your argument applies to oil prices, housing prices, inflation in general and I think that’s silly. CapEx Eventually does get subsumed into profit and debt.
Other than war, price pressure is the only lever we have for abundance and a pivot against a future of rationing and constant whinging and committee hearings about which technology is allowed to use how much RAM.
Pressure on.
If the data centers are built in Mexico TSMC will just send chips to Mexico. You don't get a cheap 5090 because you stopped a building.
The US is in a very fortunate position at the top of the global AI food chain. We don't build the chips, we don't build the machines that build the chips, we don't mine the rare earths that make up the chips.
But the chips land on our soil and are programmed by our companies (often by immigrants).
I think if we forfeit our spot it could be pretty bad economically.
Welcome to people having a say in what gets built in their neighborhoods.
We are all NIMBY when we get the results we want.
We hate NIMBYs when others get what they want.
That’s life I guess.
No taxation without representation. Controversial in 2026!
Yes this is exactly what NIMBYs who want to prevent new housing from existing say. And preventing people in a community from having a day in what gets built in their neighborhoods is precislely what state level YIMBY laws in California are intended to do.
Yeah honestly YIMBYs should just leave the state, I don't want them in my backyard.
I think NIMBY's are broadly correct, there is already too much buildings. They should lead by example and start by demolishing their own homes.
If you cannot see the fundamental difference between building datacenters that suck power, provide no local jobs, are a nuisance, and can be located almost anywhere and housing for people I simply don’t know what to tell you.
Your point is that the arguments are topologically similar but you are ignoring the impacts.
The impacts of data centers on people living nearby are basically nothing, and pretty much all anti-data-center-sentiment is driven by misinformed or willfully-delusional people. Even the idea that it's a problem that data centers "provide no local jobs" is crazy - there are all sorts of built structures that provide no local jobs because they simply have nothing to do with a business that hires employees, the idea that a data center doing much the same thing justifies making it illegal to build is crazy.
I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.
If data centres were forced to contribute what was required to build the utility infrastructure required to support them, that might be true. For example, electricity costs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/27/electrici...
Datacentres are generally built where poor people live. If you are on minimum wage and suddenly someone increases your electricity bill by $300 because of data centres, on top of all the other increases tied to things like energy insecurity... I can understand why people would consider that an impact.
Data centers are very noisy, would you live next to one?
Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
>Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
I can legally operate a slaughterhouse. How about I buy the plots on both sides of your house and start killing, gutting and cleaning cows, pigs, sheep and other animals?
Any waste can be removed a couple times a week.
I'd expect that you'd object to that perfectly reasonable business plan, yes?
What's that? There are laws (usually zoning) about who (If anyone) can run a slaughterhouse on your street?
Whatever do you mean?
Who are you to tell me what I can do on my private property?
Are you some kind of communist?
I don't mind that. Run a slaughterhouse around my house if you want. I live in a low regulation place regarding mixing residential/business and in fact there is already a slaughterhouse next to me.
Same but student housing. I'll build an apartment complex so that students can have a place to live.
I think in a residential area that would be more profitable than a slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouses don't really pencil out in busy neighborhoods.
I like a lot of what El-Sayed has said about AI, but he's kind of disingenuous here. If you add enough rules like that, nothing's ever going to get built.
Then maybe it shouldn’t be built
Then maybe he should say that if that's what he thinks.
I think he's perfectly fine with you (and everyone else with a functioning brain) to take the very simple logical leap to infer that if they can't meet the list of requirements for building, then they should not build.
But you want him to come out and say something that he doesn't believe (and has personally contradicted): that he's opposed to data centers as a point of principle, because you're ideologically convinced that that is his viewpoint, because to you that's the only reason someone would put up any type of roadblock to data center build-outs.
Maybe the people building the datacentres should come out and say they can't build them without screwing over local communities, see how that goes down.
Yes, you should always ask the city and state for a vote before doing any modification to your garden and house too.
If your garden or house screws the local community then yes.
Yes but how do you know if it screws local community? You need to go and get it votrd on before doing anything to your property.
"If we're not allowed to build datacenters without screwing over the local community, then we won't build datacenters!"
Er... I mean, if that's the case, then, fine, I guess?
I do not believe that this is actually the case. People build heavily regulated industrial facilities all the time.
The issue is not the intent of the rules, but the actual effect, which is 1) increasing the time and cost involved in building anything, and 2) abuse of those rules by bad-faith actors who wish to block or delay a development that would on average benefit the local community.
> that would on average benefit the local community.
The AI boosters appear to have badly failed in convincing local communities of this.
Perhaps they should have started off with an informative AI positive PR campaign rather than ... whatever it was that put local communities off the notion.
The heads of the big AI labs do seem to be pretty catastrophically bad at PR, I do agree. But this is hacker news, I thought we were meant to care about and look at the facts and not get swayed by the PR?
But what are the facts here? What is the benefit to the local community?
The facts will depend on each individual datacenter proposal. I'm not saying they all should be built or that none should be built, but that each one should be based on understanding of what each proposal entails that is grounded in reality as opposed to emotive broad-strokes generalisations that are either false in general or not necessarily true for every example, and ideally the tools available in the decision making process empower the former and not the latter.
What is the benefit of a data center to the local community? This is the real problem. Best case, it’s eh, whatever. It doesn’t provide jobs, but if planned and built properly it is largely inoffensive (provided that it does not cause electricity rates to rise; this is pretty locally specific as different electricity markets work different ways). Worst case, you have Elon Musk putting old jet engines next to your house, or that Bitcoin miner in Texas where neighbours report 90db noise.
At the very least, laws need to prevent the second case.
I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
Oh no, healthy food and air and water is one thing, but how can people survive without AI datacenters?
> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
This is like saying "tech employees don't raise rents, landlords raise rents in response to tech employees offering their fat salaries" - it's a distinction without a difference and the end result is what people object to.
OK, let's take that example. It is true -- landlords are responsible for raising rents, and they do so in response to demand for housing. In some places, landlords are not allowed to arbitrarily raise rents -- for example, by limiting rent increases to follow the CPI. In theory you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
> you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.
Yes, that's what the politicians in question are proposing.
This reminds me of the short-form video (Daily Show?) I saw recently of a man in a red hat insisting that the government should facilitate union workers increasingly gaining ownership of the companies and corporations they work for.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
Right, but the point is not that it is possible, it is that there are other, more important issues here. Let's say we regulate the utilities so that residential customers will not be impacted by industrial users (or by DC operators specifically). The result would be higher utility bills for those industrial users, which would encourage the use of things like turbine generators -- which I would say is a negative outcome we should avoid.
It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.
Rents rise in proportion to the rest of the market, you look at comparables. The market is a function of supply and demand. When my city passed a bunch of tenant laws ~16k units left the market and rents went up proportionally.
Yes, it is also unreasonable to blame tech employees for raising rents
> utility companies raise rates in response to demand,
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
>>“- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. I would add, “no property tax breaks”.
Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
This seems imminently fair to me.
> - Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
Note that the utility monopolies are posting record profits that have increased steadily over the last decade.
> utility monopolies
This was always a silly idea. You either have health competition or state ownership. Monopolies is literally the worst of both worlds.
Regulated monopolies can be more efficient than state ownership... if the regulatory framework has the correct incentives. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do.
The benefit with regulated monopolies are that you have a separation of control between regulation (from PSC/voters) and monopoly (running its business).
If the current regulatory regime isn't producing the desired results, it can be changed.
With straight state ownership, things are much more entangled.
> - Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
Indeed, forcing those datacenter employees to carry their pee home with them will make them think twice about replacing us with AI
I don’t think you’re supposed to put sewage in rivers but maybe I’m just some eco hippie
So connecting to city water and sewage doesn't count? What datacenter runs off waterways?
Data centers looking to use rivers for cooling?
Florida passed a state law that has standards are somewhat close to what you wrote, yet communities down here still voted to ban datacenter construction.
The industry has shredded its reputation, and now it needs to earn it back to get what they want.
This is why free markets need reasonable legislation.
Even if a good willing CEO wants to do what's right, he is pressured not to do it by the unlegislated free market - his company is at (economical) disadvantage with the opposition, putting the company at risk or not meeting his obligations to shareholders. Let's not blame consumers either, because they cannot be informed about consequences in the nth order either.
If the legislation is reasonable, everyone must play by the same rules, both the good and the bad willing CEOs. The companies gain trust, the government too, and the consumers (and affected citizens) win.
People do not believe the promises being made by these companies. For good reason.
> People do not believe the promises being made by these companies. For good reason.
Because after decades of lies, one tends to just assume that pathological liars are gonna lie pretty much all the time?
These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.
No, unless it's data center owners trying to ban new data centers, it's not the same at all.
It is the same. Do you think those people who voted against data centers aren't using Cloud services, AI, services hosted on AWS, etc.
They want the data centers, just NIMBY.
Yes, I want the datacenter just not in my backyard. Of all buildings, a datacenter is the most amenable to being put somewhere else. Maybe we can have it nearby if the corp is bringing something to the table. What's the problem?
And yeah I use cloud services. They aren't charities, I pay for those.
Or put another way, NIMBY is used as a slur but not every NIMBY position is unreasonable.
We need landfills but I don’t want to live next to a landfill. Maybe we could come to a compromise where you build the thing in a way that doesn’t negatively impact me.
There's only one way to handle slurs. I'm a NIMBY with a hard Y.
>Do you think those people who voted against data centers aren't using Cloud services, AI, services hosted on AWS, etc.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Scr...
>They want the data centers, just NIMBY.
Perhaps it's just you, because the votes say otherwise. Housing NIMBYism is people who already have homes preventing new ones from being built, for their own benefit (Price increases on existing stock). That's not what's happening with data centers.
NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes, and covers more than just homeowners. Instead, it covers when residents oppose things like schools, public transit, electricity generation, infrastructure, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
The person I initially responded to was specifically talking about housing NIMBYism, not NIMBYs in general. I pointed out how homeowners are typically the ones opposing new housing, which is not the case with data centers.
You responded with “NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes” which is true but not what was being responded to.
By the same logic, you obviously won't mind if there are open-cut-mines; a sewage plant; a tannery; a telecommunications rocket launch facility and a container shipping terminal next to your backyard.
I won't mind a shipping terminal. The rest have some pollution issues so probably should be some distance from residences. Data centers have no pollution issues and I won't mind living next door to one either. I never had problems with seeing industry, I like seeing industry, its a great sign of progress and technology.
Collossus 2's pollution from on site power generation is well documented. There's also noise; depending on the design you could have a 24/7 hum plus infrasound. These things can be unbelievable nuisances if they are built without caring, near residences.
Data centres causes noise pollution which has health impacts. Similarly, a shipping terminal, will generate particulate pollution (until they move to EV and/or trains), noise pollution and perhaps light pollution (if it's a 24/7 port).
But as you've (rightfully) indicated, not all pollution is offensive to all. You might even be able to benefit from that, I imagine housing near industrial areas might be cheaper. And we do need mines; sewage system; leather; satellites...and even data centres.
By no means am I suggesting that polluting industries should be completely banned. I believe there's a middle ground between carte blanche and a complete ban. The backlash against data centres isn't just because they are data centres. It's because they are often located in residential areas and are taking advantage of previous investments by the residents in power/water infrastructure. If they located data centres in industrial (or commercial) zones and invested to upgrade the power/water infrastructure, there'd be significantly less backlash.
Lastly, my reply was primarily directly at parineum's comment which contemptuously rejected people's legitimate concerns as if they lost all rights to democratically lobby for sensible regulation simply because something has a legitimate use in society.
Yes, personally its not just about money for me, a shipping port is scenic to me and if I could, I won't mind at all living near one.
Its because the current movement is insane and absurd made from completely imaginary flat earth level reasons, many of these protestors won't be happy with any dc at all even if they made it 10000 miles from their house. I am okay with reasonable dialog and compromise. I feel these people aren't. This is a uniquely strange phenomenon, I am not wholly ruling out the opinion of some who think this might be amplified ad sabotage by foreign powers, but then again one should never underestimate the native stupidity of americans. They elected trump twice after all.
>Data centres causes noise pollution which has health impacts
This is just false and I would have hoped people would have realised that when it was tried against wind turbines.
I live near a sewage plant. One or two days a year when I am cycling past the fence on my commute, I might get a whiff of something. People really overestimate the problem.
Even if they do use AI and are happy with it, and I'd be willing to bet that isn't always the case, the services they use today clearly don't depend on data centers that haven't even been built yet. Maybe some are happy with the current shitty AI that's a fun toy to play with, but don't want new data centers built and used to train an improved AI that will make them unemployable.
Not at all. I gave houses as an example, but I hypothetically also don't want bus or rail stops anywhere near me. Or shops. Or bars. I guess it's not nimbyism since I don't own a bus stop or a shop.
Well now you're conflating NIMBYism with just voting for your preferences. "FU, got mine" is the key component of what makes NIMBYism, NIMBYism.
Any real estate regulation can be labeled as NIMBYism. You're invoking it here as a thought-terminating cliché.
Building without considering consequences at all, or building the way that capital demands, is how you end up with urban communities getting obliterated by highways[1], or rural communities getting decimated by industrial plants[2], or indigenous communities getting destroyed by military testing[3], or indigenous people AND fragile ecosystems getting erased by military testing[4].
Edit: formatting
The key aspect of NIMBY isn't even in the acronym. The key aspect is the implication that it _is_ something that's wanted, just not here.
Being a NIMBY is wanting affordable housing... somewhere else.
Being a NIMBY is wanting more homeless shelters... somewhere else.
Not really. The regulation where everyone has to meet the same long term, unbiased standard on noise, emissions whatever, while it can also be excessive, is different from the regulation where to make use of your private property you have to follow the whims of whoever has the power. Why would data centers need to be built using union labor when there's no such requirement for anything else? In the old days you needed to placate the whims of a king to be granted the right to use your own property, now you need to placate a union boss or some design review bureaucrat.
And of course most of the examples you give are irrelevant - they don't even involve private property or specifically involve the government taking private property.
Eminent domain used to seize private land is more similar to prohibiting construction on private land, than allowing it.
Yes, I'm a NIMBY. Someone want to build more houses, maybe that's good, but the roads need to be scaled up to match. Want to build a datacenter, ok but what's in it for me? The people long-term invested in a town are the ones who should be making decisions on how to develop it, not someone coming in from the outside to make a buck.
I worked for a lab that was building a new computer room and it spent about a year in the permitting process with the local town council before getting approved. Most of the focus in that process was on the geothermal cooling system.
Why must this be done at the federal(I presume what you mean when you say national) level? Seems to me, this should be up to the local community, if they want a datacenter or not.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
> A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers.
I think the immediately preceding sentence pretty clearly laid out their rational. (Not saying I agree or disagree, just that I think your question was already answered).
People are clamoring to control what others can do on their own personal property, and then people would complain they are banned from fixing their car in their backyard. Why do people want to make their own lives worse? Do they think these laws only apply to some "other" group?
Because the tech companies operate at the national level and individual communities are at a massive disadvantage if they just negotiated individually.
> The rules he suggests are
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
> We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
We're still on the ride, and it's not gonna slow down to let any of us off.
It was recently announced that Meta was building a DC about 75km from my city that is going to be using ~1.8GW of power.
What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.
That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.
That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.
> Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.
The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"
The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this. What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
> The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this.
Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.
> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.
Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.
The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?
Well, you know, we all want to change the world.
> The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs
I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly
I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"
Not sure what you suggest to do. Plenty of countries will love to have datacenters. And these datacenters do compute, they don't need fast data transfer, they can be anywhere, pings don't matter. Plenty of countries actually love AI.
I'd argue, the biggest problem with AI is that it makes totalitarianism a lot more attractive, because it is an infinitely big state that controls all resources: so if AI becomes everything and deprives people of agency, it's no problem: government marshals all resources anyway and people have no agency even without AI if country is totalitarian - but it can also make quick decisions with no political bullshit.
Yes. It’s a nice list, is the point.
I would like the Overton window to be where you are. Till it gets there, when people are still accusing opposition of being clueless, this is a good counterpoint and resting place for agreement.
Like I said, if you watch the video I linked it's him going over his ideas for regulating the AI industry in general. I only typed up the parts regarding datacenters because it was what's most relevant to the article and the discussion.
They should also be fully covered in solar.
Corporate power is now so great that they successfully lobby to reduce/eliminate their tax burden so they don't pay for infrastructure they need.
Workers pay that cost through increased market prices and taxes (eg energy) which also drives up other prices. It's not inflationary because it's a real value adjustment but everyone can pretend it is while real term wages drop even further.
It's not exactly brain surgery.
This all seems reasonable. My question is, how would data centre bossess genuinely respond to these points?
I find it difficult get to the genuine points, as the whole topic is piled high with “arguments”, PR, marketing, and other junk discourse being emitted from all sides.
Kevin Oleary's data center is going to be built one hour from my town. A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center. Here's what I hear and my response:
"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
"Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
My concern is I don't want tax payers left holding the bag if this falls apart but it seems like, at least with this DC, that that's not the case. This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Edit: I checked. This is going to use 162 million less gallons per year than the farm.
data centers = billionare scheme to take all our jobs away and enslave us.
Its not that hard to understand or deserves any gotcha questions. Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners. God i hate "well actually" tech nerds so much.
I can't tell if you're being satirical or not and that just proves my point even more.
What part of it sounds satirical to you? It's all true.
AI companies don't exactly try to hide the fact that their end goal is replacing all human jobs.
Then it should be easy to cite your source. Let’s see the “goal = replacing all human jobs” announcement?
It is indeed very easy:
https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/anthropic-ceo-warning-ai-job-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go...
I'm not bakugo, but here you go:
"However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this [this being areas were humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time that keeps them employed] will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." [1]
"Over the weekend, Musk responded to an user on X that said that the humanoid’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the entire global labor market, [...]" [2]
Altman is a little more cautious and thinks (out loud, I doubt he actually does) we'll all be artists on UBI, or something:
"[...] maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us [...] find new ways to play status games, ability to find new methods for creative expression" "And I think we need something like basic income to have a cushion and a smooth transition to the jobs of the future." "In a world where technology eliminates jobs, it will mean that the cost of having a great life goes down a lot." [3]
These aren't very realistic or popular scenarios, but the people building frontier AI (ok, well, one of those three is not like the others...) wanted to get them out there. Seems people don't want to sign up for the questionable utopias.
[1] https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#3-eco...
[2] https://eletric-vehicles.com/tesla/tesla-q2-earnings-here-ar...
[3] all on X, https://x.com/sama
Did you miss the whole "Stop Hiring Humans" billboards that were all over SF?
Or Microsoft's AI chief's "I think we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So, white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer — either being, you know, a lawyer, or an accountant, or a project manager, or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Or Dario's "software engineering will be fully automated in 12 months" or "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs"
Or Altman's “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me... On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”
Either you've been living under a rock, or you're pretending to be ignorant.
Yes, not living in SF I did miss the SF billboards. You’re very insulting to non-SF folks, you know that? Perhaps I am neither “living under a rock” nor “pretending” anything?
The others speak to human labor shifting. Word processors wiped out the typist profession, but that is not the same as wiping out jobs in general. The corporate goal of WordStar, WordPerfect, etc, was never to cause unemployment for typists, even if that was the effect.
You still didn’t cite anything supporting the claim that these companies have a goal of causing mass unemployment. You’re choosing to interpret observations in a way that maximizes your confirmation bias. IMO it is equally valid to interpret those statements as envisioning shifting human work to higher value areas.
Go ahead, insult me more.
Replacing human jobs should be the dream of all people. You want humans doing drudgery when it could be automated by machines? Why?
> And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
— Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1891
> I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading
That's unfortunate, as manual labor will be the only thing left if AI companies have their way.
Yea thats fine but you think they will distribute the wealth to you in particular?
i mentioned it in my comment too
> Maybe they should ask you how exactly do you plan to feed your family once all the jobs are gone and only ppl who have any say are data center owners.
i am not conviced that markzuckerberg stays up all night building datacenters so he can pass on that wealth to you.
This is explicitly about manual labor. The things on the verge of being automated are precisely not in the "sweeping a slushy crossing" category. If Wilde was here to see the things the slop-peddlers are calling art, he'd be distraught.
That would be true under a good economic system. Instead we have a system where the benefits are reaped by the few, and the masses get to either work or starve. Taking away the "work" option is, needless to say, offensive to those.
i get the impression that comment was tongue in cheek, but my unironic opinion is that AI is bad for humanity, and it's good and correct to oppose data centers on the grounds that AI is bad.
ai is good. 10 ppl controlling ai is bad.
I hate AI. I dread going to work every day now. But it's here and it's going to happen. At least my county gets to benefit from it.
According to The Reverse Centaur’s Guide,[1] capital investment in AI is so high that the only possible way for the investments to make enough (and to avoid a bubble) is if whole classes of jobs are automated wholesale. And of course that Capital then takes the saved money from that. Maybe some people dislike datacenters-for-AI based on that. Because it’s all part of the same scheme.
Maybe people who don’t quite like that should be more articulate about it rather than using seeming post hoc reasoning like “water”? I don’t know. In my experience the bar for frustrated-five-on-the-street is quite high if they want to avoid an aww-shucks this voting bloc and their social medias.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621575/thereversecenta...
Most people probably don't do that much research on these things. But they have heard about water shortages, and they have all been exposed to horror stories from around the world about data centers causing pollution, or horrifying noise, or whatever. Is the nature of the news cycle.
This might be the case, but it's not going to stop the technology from stealing your jobs. Billionaires in countries like China are going to leap frog over the US in terms of technology or the billionaires here will just build there instead.
If you think Flock cameras are bad, you have no idea the kind of surveillance the Chinese government uses on their people.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped trying to help people help themselves. Instead, I just watch and close my door in their face when they beg for help.
It's fairly easy to see how having your local government spying on you could be a problem. It's much harder to see how a government on the other side of the world spying on you is a problem.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
What money is it going to bring? 6 months of noisy construction work and then like.. half a dozen security guys on shifts and an engineer call out once a week?
The build out will take a couple years. I don't care about the noise. No one will hear it. It's an hour away from anything. Truly in the middle of nowhere. The DC will employee probably 100 high paid people. That money goes back into my town. The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC. It's going to be the biggest tax generator this county has ever seen by a lot. We just had to raise property taxes by 37% to fund our schools. We need the money.
I seriously doubt it needs 100 highly paid people. These will be automated to death. A few guys employed out of state, periodically visiting to swap out dead GPUs and staying in the nearest hotel. Maybe a bored HVAC engineer on site for maintenance.
I don't doubt you need the money. But the tax take on these places is always fictional.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
If you look at 10-36MW DCs, the number of people on site is like 10, many are security and it's not a proportional relationship.
I don't know much about this, but isn't Stratos ultimately planned to be 9GW, or 250x the size of your 36MW DC? Even if it doesn't scale proportionally, it's not hard to see it get to 100 people.
It will not employ 100 highly paid people, sorry.
According to Oleary it will employ about 5000 permanent workers. According to the county it will employ 1-2k permanent workers. These are going to be rented out data centers to other companies who will staff their people here. There will need to be a large number of people managing the power generation. What resources do you have to say it won't employ 100 people?
These numbers are pretty inconsistent with other major data center rollouts. Furthermore, there are no repercussions (AFAIK) if the project fails to deliver that many permanent jobs. Oleary can say all he wants but unless there is some specific tax or legal measure that says "you must pay at least 2,000 FTE at a rate of $150k/year for at least 20 years" then it's basically impossible to guarantee these numbers. And frankly no data center developer would sign up for that liability knowing full well that humans at data center may well end up being automated (even more than they are today).
Experience?
The massive Foxconn Wisconsin project promised 13,000 jobs. They ended up with 1/10th of that. That wasn't even a data center, it was intended to be manufacturing tangible goods. The outcome is the same, though, they over-promise and under-deliver.
The data centers employ a shit ton of people when they're built, but are sparsely staffed after construction. By your own admission, the data center is in the middle of nowhere next to a stinky swamp. Where are these employees going to live?
You have to understand that O'Leary will say that it will employ thousands of people to get this built, even if it is not true. Once it's built, what's the penalty for automating the thing and employing almost no one?
You want this because you see that your town is crumbling, and totally understand that. Small towns live and die by their ability to attract people from the outside, and nobody is coming to see a data center. The towns which survive are those which have farmer's markets on the weekend and can draw crowds. They have a reason for someone to come there, whether it's a theater, a brewery, or a historical site.
You've been promised a Field of Dreams, but that's all that it is.
> The best benefit is going to be how much tax revenue we get from this DC
You're saying this all over the thread, but not one word about how much revenue and what percent of your county's budget that is. Some actual numbers please.
According to the county 30 million per year during the build out then 108 million at max capacity. Our budget last year was 76.3 million. This will be more money than we know what to do with.
The DC is going to pay $108m in property taxes per year? There's a source for this?
You're still wrong about the job creation benefits. But if this is really, verifiably true it sounds like a good deal.
"This will be more money than we know what to do with." That sounds like putting the cart before the horse. This is what leads to inflated city budgets, wasteful/risky projects and fraud.
The Power plant is still going to contribute to cooking the planet and using all the remaining fossil fuels, so nothing will be left for our grandchildren.
If you believe all of those counter points will hold true for even a month after operation starts you're real naive. People driving the plans to build out this infrastructure do not care about a single point listed there and will lie to get it over the line.
All of these counter points? Do you think they're going to pull a fast one and move the building hundreds of miles at the last second into someone's back yard? What about water? Are they going to at the last minute change the cooling from a closed loop system? This is going to use 162 million gallons less per year than the farm. How in the world is the DC going to burn through that much extra water at the last minute? Are they going to pull a fast one on us and just hook the building into the grid? What are you talking about?
You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
The claim was that they generate power and can feed back into the grid, that requires a grid connection.
If they have a grid connection, they are going to take power from the grid when cheaper than generating power.
1. Closed loop water systems use chemicals that can leech out of the system. There is 100% going to be more discoveries as time goes on with such a fast build out. Maybe not enough to make it not worthwhile? But not 100% safe either.
2. I’m anti-data center. I think at some point, you pull the levers you have? I think the tech industry is too consolidated and wields too much power, and the whole data center buildout has been done under a shroud of secrecy.
I think it’s rational to pull the levers you have, when the industry is predicting something close to the apocalypse.
Yes it’s mostly vibes, but until the industry stops acting like fucking nutters. I’m voting on vibes.
> You're proving my point. No one is actually thinking about this. Everyone is just driven by hatred for people who have more money than them.
The policy-informed theory of How The Rich Are Irrationally Hated.
No, I just know how business works. When you are doing something like this you establish the bare minimum as the baseline, get your foot in the door, then start testing boundaries.
Also these buildings will be abandoned within the next couple years as models move more towards the edge.
Are you saying they're going to construct the data center then move it to a different location? Or are you suggesting they're going to change the laws of physics so that sound propagates differently?
Why did you leave out water and electricity use?
I'm saying that just because they say that they will generate their own electricity, or require less water than a farm, doesn't mean that they will continue to do so into the future.
> The county is gaining water from this
All farming should be stopped immediately and converted to data centres, then we’ll have unlimited water!
Why not both actually? https://www.theaquaponicsource.com/data-center-heat-reuse/
Tell me you know nothing about water rights and farming…
Some farming should indeed be stopped, and we would have more water. Farming is not an unmitigated food, no matter how sarcastic you are.
How are they generating this electricity without competing for resources generally?
There is also the increase in cost of borrowing for everyone. Going this fast is just insane.
Natural gas which is abundant and cheap. I suppose I could see my gas bill going up.
And you don't see any problem with burning more natural gas?
What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
What are you talking about? We can and do tell people what they can and can't do with their land all the time. That's what zoning laws do.
>We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land
We the voters 100% can.
It's literally illegal to build apartments almost everywhere.
Do you think this is good?
No
We can certainly tell people it's illegal to emit pollution into the air.
Advancing civilization will require increasing energy use, yes. That's always been the long-term trend of development.
How is that working out environmentally?
I think people would be more open to the data center buildout if the data center projects built their own clean energy infrastructure
Great. Long term, environmental deaths have greatly decreased: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-deaths?...
Heat related and pollution related deaths aren't counted in that chart.
Advancing civilization to what temperature?
> What do you want the county to do? We can't tell someone that it's illegal to use their land. This is happening. I'm happy that we're getting a good deal out of it.
You were asking for good reason against the data centers - I would imagine not being complicit in the detrimental effects caused by burning exorbitant amounts of fossils for electricity could be one of them.
The problem is that anyone who actually cares about such thing has like a dozen better venues to deal with it than data centers, yet they haven't in their lives thought of a single one.
What are you talking about? Why shouldn't we be opposed to all new use of fossil fuels?
Gas turbine generators which were originally designed for temporary use and don't meet the emissions regulations of a power plant?
Incremental use of more NG is a terrible idea. We have to get off of fossil fuels, not use even more, especially for this
The county is currently building a nuclear power plant
Then the DC should surely help fund it, and its existence should be dependent in its completion? Otherwise it will be like every other large scale development that offers this without being on the hook.
The nuclear will get delayed. Always does.
If the concern is non-localized resource or debt contention how is it different from any business?
I get generalized anxiety about pace of progress, but then let’s have that discussion rather than the canards about water or noise (which can be real in some cases, but taking GP at their word that’s not the case here).
> how is it different from any business?
This is the crux. It's different because data centers are illegally operating gas turbines. If CVS were playing loud music all night every night, nobody would doubt the ability of local law enforcement to shut it down. That is not true of (specifically) AI data centers, so it is rational to reject them until law enforcement gains the ability to police them.
Everyone has their own issue with this, it seems, but the majority has some issue.
Someone with more knowledge than my 2-minutes of googling should correct me, but...
It sounds like they'd be using the natural gas pipeline they would generate from starts in Opal, Wyoming (goes all the way to Oregon), and that the company behind it was in huge amounts of debt and filed Chapter 11 a few years ago.
So at a glance, I'm curious if making it profitable might be helpful to everyone, but would need someone with more info to chime in before I could say that.
I recall hearing an interview with a democratic politician (can't recall who), he had this thing: data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy). This seems pretty reasonable to me, if the data centres pay for any build-out of the grid required for their operation and bring online green energy, then they are fine. For the community, worst case they go bust and leave behind an improved grid. Off-grid gas generators are not BYONCE.
>data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy)
This is just another way of saying "no data centers can be built". The people who want to build data centers don't care what it's powered by, but they choose gas turbines over wind & solar because renewables can't handle the power demands.
That seems like an awfully defeatist attitude. With all the capital investment flowing into AI, there should be plenty of money to research and improve renewables (including fusion, fission, and battery technology) to meet the moment. After all, we need to move past fossil fuels and are already delayed on this path, so AI is a good catalyst (among many) to make progress.
On a meta-level, it's terrible politics for tech companies to roll out a technology that many don't see a need for and fear will take away their livelihood, while at the same time increasing CO2 emissions because renewables are too hard. Of course this course of action runs into massive opposition.
I'm not sure how this is a defeatist attitude, I view it more like a realist one. Any rules that would be passed to require mandatory clean energy sourcing for data centers would probably mimic new vehicle emission regulations, which are purposely designed to be so hard to meet that it's a de facto ban.
> new vehicle emission regulations, which are purposely designed to be so hard to meet that it's a de facto ban.
???
"It can't be done"? Really?
Have you tried asking Claude? Surely it can solve the problem of "how can we power AI with clean energy?" I mean, if it couldn't do that ... well, it wouldn't really be useful enough to justify building all these datacenters, would it?
It doesn't matter what their reasons are. It's their community
A community is not a sovereign nation. I know that eminent domain is considered by many (and historically rightly so) to be a dirty tool, but sometimes it really is in the benefit of the country and its economy to build things even if the people living in or around that area don't like it, especially if their only reason to resisting is "I don't like it".
Fine, let them go through eminent domain. I'll wait.
I get that they have a right to self determination but when did that start meaning others can’t have opinions about (perceived) short sightedness?
Am I allowed to think less of people who vote for stuff like mandatory prayer in schools, even if it is their community and their right to vote for what they want?
It's my community too. My opinion is worth just as much as theirs.
Since data centre projects are getting rammed through at breakneck speed despite very widespread opposition, it might look to others like your opinion is actually worth significantly more than theirs, simply because it happens to be shared by a handful of people with god tier money.
I agree. So hold the vote. You won't like the result.
Hence why it’s on the ballots.
huh, seeing confederate talking points in this thread was not on my bingo card
Thinking that people should decide if an infrastructure megaproject of dubious utility to their community should be built? Basically identical to thinking that people should decide what races live in their community and whether slavery is allowed.
The HN crashout over people suddenly disliking hyperscalers for some reason is something you could only witness here.
opposition to datacenters is equivalent to supporting slavery, thanks HN
Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls
Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.
And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.
"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.
"...is a pipe dream" I don't get it. Do you think they're just going to.. not pay taxes?
Yes, I do. Know why I think that? Under threat of another expensive lawsuit, my local datacenter forced our town council to give a 50% tax cut for 12 years. So they are already able to not pay about 1.7 billion in taxes. If they could pay $0, they would.
So your town gave up $140 million PER YEAR in tax revenue to avoid an expensive lawsuit? I call bullshit.
EDIT: I looked it up, not surprisingly, you're really shading the truth here. This is the barn, yes? So it looks like what happened is that the township denied the application for the DC, the developer sued, and the township cut a deal to let the DC go through, with a 50% cut to their tax bill for 12 years. Then the value of the DC went up dramatically, because AI, and the township tried to claim that the tax cut was for 50% of the original value when they approved the tax cut, not 50% of the property value when the tax is due. Their own attorney told them that was bullshit, so they eventually dropped it.
This is like if a store gives you a coupon for 50% off and then you take it in to redeem it a few months later and they've quadrupled their prices, and they try to tell you the coupon actually means 50% off of what their prices were when you got the coupon. Ridiculous.
Yes. They have tax exemptions. These exemptions have not been removed: https://youtu.be/boEYllBaYv4 - There is a reason your rural town was targeted.
They have even started building without waiting for permitting. No, I'm not joking.
https://youtu.be/a8EJb4RrryQ
Why not just build the data center right on Oleary's land, right next to his mansion? He'll create jobs there too.
It's the same reason politicians won't house illegal immigrants in their home.
Is it? What is the reason?
"I support <thing>, but not in my backyard!"
Politicians support illegal immigrants?
Democrat ones, yes.
"No human is illegal on stolen land"
"ICE is ripping our communities apart, we value our neighbors"
Plus obviously removing voter ID checks, who do you think that benefits?
Deportations were big under Obama, I am not sure of the data under Biden. America is strong against illegal immigration. Democratic or Republican I think you are not discussing this in good faith.
I guess this is an improvement. In the UK they refuse to have them anywhere inside their constituency.
This land he's building it on is cheap and I look forward to my county using it to advantage everyone. Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?"
also you
* "A lot of people here seem upset about it but when I talk to them I can't get a single good reason to oppose the data center."
* "I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me."
First, maybe they don't trust the company doing the development, or Kevin Oleary. What they are saying may or may not be true, but if they've made a habit of being casual with the truth or not following through on their word it doesn't really matter, does it?
That is tough, and it is why it's so important to maintain one's reputation.
Second, I seem to recall Oleary running around to news outlets telling anyone with a camera that the only reason that anyone would oppose the project was if they were somehow working with the PRC and trying to hurt America.
"Why do you think you get a say on what happens in my home?" is a very valid thing you said, and I actually respect it. If, instead, I said something like, "you are just tool of Elon Musk and AI has tricked you" it would probably feel insulting and you would be predisposed be hostile to me.
I think the way the project was done was disrespectful to other people in the area. Ultimately, laws and the voting process will handle it as it should be. If the project can be relied on to bring the benefits without causing the harm that you claim it will, it should be a slam dunk case.
Third, people are concerned about economic security and loss from AI and this specific project can't escape it. Our field has made its own bed there. These concern are valid and public statements by the involved CEOs and large scale layoffs can't be easily dismissed.
What's your take on the tax exemptions they're getting? Without tax revenue, how will everyone else in your county benefit?
Oleary already owns the land, how much cheaper can free be since he wants to build it so badly.
Because in Ontario, where his mansion is located, the government hasn't been approving such projects and is facing pressure not to. (https://globalnews.ca/news/12134754/ford-government-to-appro...) Even if the province approved, the lake community surrounding his mansion might not want one, for all the same reasons that the US voters in the source article don't want one.
He owns land in several places
> They're generating their own electricity
Yeah, from natgas right? Or maybe diesel generators? Or are they building one of the practically nonexistent green energy data centers?
Natural gas. I suppose my gas bill could go up
And your pollution levels.
What about emissions from the generation of this power in salt lake valley? I believe a big argument was the valley with its inversions and geographical layout makes that pollution much worse for people who live in it.
This DC will be probably a 3 hour drive from the Salt Lake valley. We're building a nuclear power plant as well which is going to help with pollution.
Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property. I'm just happy we're getting such a good deal out of this.
Voters can absolutely regulate emissions, land use, etc.
> Ultimately we can't stop Oleary from building this. It's his legal right to do what he wants with his property.
When there is political will we can absolutely restrict people from doing things with their property. This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
Whether the political will in your specific case has reached that point is another issue, but in many cases it seems to be approaching that level, especially where existing or proposed developments seem like they will directly impact the community that's already there.
>This is the entire premise of zoning laws among other regulations.
And then people complain not enough houses are getting built.
The law can be used for good things or bad things. I think we still need laws though.
Yes, a giant building running gas turbines that employs 12 people is exactly the same as housing that hundreds of families could live in.
The nuclear power plant will only help with pollution if it replaces existing fossil fuel use. If it just meets growing demand, pollution persists, and if growing demand is also filled by some fossil fuels then pollution increases, but just a bit slower because of the nuclear.
Also, if you want to leave a livable planet for your kids...
And there it is, folks. That is the key issue here - or at least, one of them. This new data center would pollute the environment, not to mention taking up land. The consideration, then, is whether the need for yet another data center justifies the added pollution and land use. That’s a value judgment, and it seems a lot of people say no, we don’t need more data centers, not even for “AI” - at least not enough to justify the added pollution.
You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.
It is a democracy. They don't have to give you an answer an answer at all, even if you disagree with it. They get to feel how they feel, and the onus on persuading them otherwise.
Maybe Oleary should spend a minute figuring out there is resistance to the project by listening to the people in the area, and if it's really a good idea he should be able to make his case to convince them otherwise.
Maybe it's how he's done it, more than the outcome. And that is not an invalid reason, people enjoy feeling respected and that they have a voice.
These seem to be very specific to this project, and I doubt the majority of DC projects are like this one, an hour away with its own gas turbines to generate power and plenty of water available.
There also seems to be a Utah-specific bill from last year requiring large electricity users to pay the additional infrastructure and power-supply costs attributable to serving them rather than shifting those costs onto existing utility customers. This is also not the case everywhere DCs are being built.
I hear that a lot and I'm happy with my county for making sure we get a good deal out of this. I think a lot of people are informed by the few bad cases and think that all DCs are going to do this.
They are building gas turbines to power it.
You aren't getting a good deal.
The project that just failed near me in WY was setup to be very similar.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Generating their own electricity how? I would be pissed if I got one of these xAI power turbines near my area [1]. And even if they weren't loud, gas plants are environmentally bad.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Electricity prices will go up! The data centers won't keep generate their own electricity if they aren't forced to. They will just take electricity from the grid when it's cheaper than generating, and will start generating only when the costs of generating are lower.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-ge...
They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid. We're currently building a nuclear reactor in my county as well. This is economic growth and a good thing. My town is dying. Main street is depressing. There's a general lack of optimism in the people here.
And the DC will employ, what, 20 people long-term? It’s not a factory.
We'll bring in buckets of money in taxes. Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC.
> We'll bring in buckets of money in taxes
Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue? I am skeptical because typically these projects receive tax payer money.
> Not to mention the nuclear power plant being built in response to the DC
A nuclear power plant takes 6-10 years to build in the US, and sometimes even longer.
> Got any hard numbers on the tax revenue?
According to the county FAQ: https://www.boxeldercountyut.gov/661/Stratos-Page-FAQ-Page
> What tax revenue is expected?
> In Phase One, the county expects to receive $30 million in annual tax revenue. When fully built out, it could generate up to $108 million every year.
"Expects" to receive is weasle-y. How much will they receive?
"Could" generate 108 million a year
Naw man. These numbers need to be more concrete upfront. This sounds like "under ideal conditions (that we won't ever achieve)" weasling
A "small" datacenter I personally know if in a municipality I am directly involved with generates about $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage) tariff. That ignores any property taxes and the rest.
This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.
I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.
This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.
These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.
> $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage)
Wow, that's a lot of electricity. What market is that electricity purchased from?
Comed in this case. So the PJM interconnect region.
The locality tax is in addition to everything else paid on the electric bill.
And yes, datacenters have always been about converting electrons to photons, density of photonic output and electron input steadily increasing over time.
Why bringing in buckets in taxes, is it owned by a local company? That, or one of us is misunderstanding how taxes work.
Taxes are assessed at multiple levels. Property taxes go to the municipality.
$108 million annually in property tax?
Data centers and almost all big companies don’t bring in any taxes. They negotiate zero property taxes for 30 years and have govts pay them money, because they say the half dozen people they employ are going to create a boom in the economy, they will buy houses, eat out, go to bars and this will create money for the local govt and property taxes.
The bucket of money is from the food truck, the only business that can be sustainable from a DC in the local area. The food truck is cash only, because they payment company now charges 50% because they are using AI to counter the spam and fraud from the other companies using AI.
Yes, which is why the smart way to do it would be to allow it but make sure it brings in plenty of tax revenue.
(Farms don’t employ many people either.)
> (Farms don’t employ many people either.)
I can't eat the output of a data center, though.
You don’t eat the output of most US farms either unless you subsist on field corn, soybeans, and hay.
Ooo, this is exciting, I so rarely get to be the random dumbass crawling out of the woodwork to provide a statistically-unlikely counterexample to an otherwise sound point!
I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.
Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.
Field corn is made into chips and tortillas, not to mention also processed into corn syrup. Cornbread, polenta...
Hay is the stalk of a grain plant. We take the grain off the stalk and make it into flour. A main ingredient in bread and pasta/noodle.
I do, however, eat the things that eat those. Or byproducts (milk, cheese, etc) from them.
The point is that something tangible is produced.
Youre eating alfalfa that gets shipped to china and the middle east?
This is exactly the argument people are worried about. "If prices go up, it's a good thing." For whom? Residents will have to pay this for a decade before a nuclear reactor comes online.
It will accelerate the shift to solar for residential purposes.
That’s a great thing.
everyone gets a better grid.
Sure, but who pays for it?
If the data center which requires the grid improvements is fully paying for the upgrades, I'm OK with it. OTOH, if they expect to fob off the cost of the otherwise-optional upgrade on the rest of the ratepayers, Fck-NO!
And for those who say "but it benefits the rest of the ratepayers, so they should pay too", NO! If you (person or corp) come in and demand we change something, you should be a net benefit for everyone, not just yourself.
Be a good citizen and help everyone, and you'll find support. Don't, and find people see you as an asshat and you'll find opposition.
Ok fine keep the crappy grid. I don't know if it's actually cheaper to have blackouts but there's no sticker shock when it happens.
“Let’s stop all new economic activity as it might have an effect on <insert commodity> prices” is just so juvenile and poorly thought through.
That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day for the sake of shareholder value.
> That's a reductive take in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course people will resist commercial developments that'll increase the cost of one of the most essential resources everyone uses day-to-day
Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction of the average American's budget, which is far more heavily weighted toward housing, gas, and groceries. This argument is extremely tenuous.
> for the sake of shareholder value
This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me. These data centers drive down the cost of AI, which is valuable to me, and to society. The fact that it also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant.
> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
No they aren't
They're being built so shareholders can profit off of people like you. The fact that you benefit from it does not actually factor in any way aside from the fact that you will pay them for that benefit
They aren't benevolently trying to help you out, they just want your money.
The fact that you want AI and think it will help you and society is actually what is irrelevant. If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built no matter how beneficial it would be.
>> Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me
> No they aren't
You literally said they are building data centers to cater to demand later on in your own comment:
> If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built
There you go. Your own point debunked by your own words.
> They aren't benevolently trying to help you out
I didn't say anything about the owners building stuff out of charity or benevolence. Are you responding to the wrong comment? Yours is more-or-less irrelevant to mine in addition to being self-contradictory.
Come on bud. You claimed
> The fact that it (building data centers) also happens to increase "shareholder value" is irrelevant
It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built
Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards
Please own up to the fact that you self-contradicted yourself in your own comment by first claiming that "No they aren't" and then "If they weren't confident it would make them money it would not be built".
> It's not irrelevant. It is the primary reason they are being built
...and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant. Do you understand what relevance means? It means that there's meaning, implication. You haven't given a single follow-on implication from that hypothesis that actually matters to the discussion.
> Your understanding about the cause and effect around why data centers are being built is completely backwards
No, this is just factually false.
Fact: for datacenters, without market demand, without a buyer, shareholder value cannot possibly be generated.
So, first there is a market, and then companies act on it to generate shareholder value.
You're living in a world detached from reality where "shareholder value" exists as its own separate entity that can generate market demand.
You need to take a high-school level economics course so that you don't make objectively incorrect statements like this.
> and without any implications, that fact is irrelevant
If you think people's motivations are irrelevant then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing
> If you think people's motivations are irrelevant
I never said that peoples' motivations are irrelevant in general. Just that they're irrelevant in this specific case. You're putting words in my mouth, which clearly indicates malice.
> then we just live in different worlds, and there's no point continuing
We do. I live in reality, where most people understand basic facts of economics, causality is meaningful, and you still haven't actually provided a reason why you think that the motivations matter, so as far as the rest of us in the real world know, they don't. You've had three comments to point that out, and you haven't, so the reasonable conclusion is that you don't have a reason, and you're running away to avoid that intellectual dissonance.
There can be multiple effects for a given action. The main objection I have to this argument is the idea that the only beneficiaries of any corporate decision are the shareholders.
> Your argument conveniently ignores that electricity is tiny fraction
You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
> This is emotionally manipulative and without substance. Data centers are being built because there's demand for them from people who want to use AI, like me.
At my company's internal conference we had a rep from one of our partners come speak, and he emphasized that a significant value-add of our company's relationship to our partners is that we're much more tech-forward. he went on to say "Execs in [partner industry] don't know what AI is or what it does, but they know that they want it."
We're seeing AI features being bolted into every application under the sun, whether it actually adds functionality or not. I think you bear a significant burden of proof to the claim that the demand for datacenters is in turn driven by consumer demand for AI, and company boards losing their minds over what they think AI can do and demanding their R&D divisions sink millions of dollars into AI spend to try and capitalize on their dreams.
I'm reminded of Bitcoin: for a hot minute every startup was talking about blockchain and GPUs were getting snapped up by miners left and right because of what people imagined the value could be. That's what I'm getting at when I say "shareholder value:" these developments seem to be less about what value a company is _actually_ producing (& thus the inherent cost-of-goods-sold demand), and more about the _possibility_ of what value a company _could_ produce.
> You assume people's psychological resistance to increased cost is entirely based on the proportional impact of those cost increases. Yes, housing/gas/groceries are much larger portions of the increase in cost, but datacenters are much more visible than poor foreign policy or starting new conflicts with overseas energy producers. Also, electricity traditionally has much less cost variation than gas/housing/groceries.
This is a good point. I see that I misunderstood your original argument - I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful, rather than what you actually said, which was the perception of and response to the increase. My apologies. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
> I thought you were claiming that the increase was going to be financially meaningful
tbf, I didn't state the psychological thesis up front either :)
Some people on HN live in an ivory tower. Every "tiny fraction" is a big deal to someone working two jobs to pay rent.
> ... to someone working two jobs to pay rent.
Or two jobs and a "side-gig" or three, and still barely "squeaking by", and still unable to afford health care or any other such "luxuries" of life.
there is no cost of living crisis
I mean, if the new economic activity primarily serves to further enrich the wealthy then ya, that seems like a reasonable stance.
If I get a vote about new economic activity, and it makes me personally poorer, I'm going to need a very good argument as to why I should permit it. Or, you know, pay me.
If the data centers hadn't been _quite_ so hostile to absolutely all their critics and instead had simply offered to pay for some local schools or libraries or something, at like 5% of the cost of the data center, this would have gone differently.
Instead Altman says it will destroy the world: https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-sam-altman...
So it's bad for the world according to its proponents, and at the same time, a bad neighbour? Why would anyone not vote against it given those?
If that new economic activity has lopsided benefits and will never pay off for those negatively impacted by those price increases, then yeah shut it down or regulate it so that the benefits are shared equally by all. Shorter version, if the new economic activity is exploitive of people and their communities, then shut it down hard.
People are tired of New Economic Activity that only benefits the already-rich.
Generally, economic activity is supposed to raise living standards. AI promisses to a.) speed up climate change b.) facilitate surveillance and authoritarian tech bros b.) make people obsolete and unemployable c.) kill us all because reasons.
Datacenter is not bringing more economic activity to the area.
future economic activity is fine;
the questions are 1) who is footing the bill and 2) who is benefiting from that economic activity
if it's not the local community, then why should they agree to it much less pay for some of it
Further question, why is it the default position that others should have a say on legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land? Thats frankly absurd. It should be on the people breaching others private property rights to prove real damages.
Pretending that market-distorting impacts on local utilities, air pollution, noise pollution, etc. etc. are just "legal activities you are allowed to do on your own land" is flabbergastingly dishonest.
Are you sure about noise pollution or are you copying something heardd from uninformed people? Again, thr onus should be on you tonprove damages in court. Its fucking ridiculous that people are clamoring to control others private property.
is this a serious question? because a DC has external impacts which, say, a workshop on your property does not; that's why.
How can you be sure the workshop on your property doesn't have external impacts? You are being a bad community player by not first getting your workshop inspected and tested and awaiting the permission of the community and government before doing anything there.
Juvenile? Seems like utility maxing rational actors to me.
This is an intellectually dishonest and frankly completely inappropriate attempt to twist someone’s words. HN generally has good standards about acceptable comments and I’m surprised to see this here.
If we brought them up a decade earlier we wouldn’t have had to wait. Instead, we were told “renewables can replace fossil fuels”, despite us lacking the battery capacity to make them viable for the grid. Nuclear is a direct replacement for fossil fuels with better energy generation and actual on-demand capabilities, plus it’s far safer than fossil fuel-backed media will admit. We could have been using both and have completely cut down on emissions while also increasing the lifetime of our nuclear stores.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
For that little old retired lady who is on a fixed income, of course! It means she'll have to sell that cute little house of hers and let someone turn it into an AirBnB and make some actual money from it.
/s
It sounds like your town needs a monorail! Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail!
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity. Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Everyone involved will lie in exchange for money. Put it in writing, make it legally binding, and then maybe I would believe them. They haven't done that, have they? Also, who do you think pays for expanding your grid?
> They're using natural gas to generate electricity.
Yep. And that will decrease air quality locally, which is especially bad for people with asthma or other sensitivities. And increases greenhouse gases globally. And this natural gas generator will probably be less efficient than a normal power plant.
> This is economic growth and a good thing.
Not much. Sure, there will be some construction jobs while it is being built, but after that, there won't be many jobs for the DC. And there is a good chance the jobs that will exist won't go to local residents. And the owners of the DC aren't going to be buying much if anything from the local community.
> Everyone involved has said that it won't pull power from the grid. But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
What on earth is this "If I get in a car accident, it's actually a good thing because I get to buy a new, better car" logical reasoning?
Using electricity is not breaking anything. "If I sell all my widgets, it's actually a good thing because I'll have to hire more people and manufacture more widgets" is entirely coherent.
Using electricity to the point that the grid cannot accommodate it is indeed breaking something that was working before, and the data center folks are surely not going to be the only ones paying for the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate it.
It'd be like your widget maker harvesting wood for their widgets from public land and exhausting it so the public is left without this resource, then expecting the public to pay to arrange for more wood to be grown to replace the wood they used up.
Who is paying for the natural gas pipeline extension? Who is upgrading the upstream supply to manage the extra demand?
Did you know that global average temperatures are the highest they've been in 125,000 years, and temperatures are rising more than 20x faster than natural rates of global warming. Also the oceans are 30% more acidic, and the world's land ice is melting at a rate of like 660 billion tons per year. There's probably around 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere because warmer air holds more moisture and warmer water evaporates more quickly. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Etc etc
But what about this guy's small town with a population of under 10k????????
Put your money where your mouth is.
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
It's always convenient for you when someone else has to make sacrifices to their job security, housing, financial future, and comfort in order to save the environment, when you get to enjoy all the perks of their sacrifice, without needing to make any equivalent sacrifices yourself.
Seems like this can go both ways. You should volunteer to have a bank of loud, polluting turbines from obsolete passenger jets running 24/7 next to your home so Meta can serve GenAI ads with 5% lower latency.
Only if you subscribe to the logic that somehow I support datacenters built in peoples' back yards, which I never claimed, but you made up. If you make stuff up, you can make any argument you want.
Sorry, your small town getting a short stint of construction work followed by maybe 20 sysadmins, is not worth the pollution that DC will pump.
I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?
Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.
Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.
My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.
In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.
Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.
>so screw your small town
I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.
>We all share this world.
Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.
>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?
> care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns.
It's CO2, it's in my town too.
I'm saying, the minor economic boon for this small town is not remotely worth the pollution over the lifetime of that data center ran off turbines.
> while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society
We could enjoy the modern luxuries a bit more without Altman Et. Al. working to centralize labor into expensive automated Capital that we'd all have to rent back. Hell, even with some pollution caused by relocating manufacturing stateside.
I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
> And where was that car manufactured?
Michigan.
>I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
That's why in my country the government is incentivizing via fiscal policies for employers to be cancelling all home office perks to employers. To get people back to spending money on commuting.
>Michigan
So what's your opinion on building car factories there? If we remove those factories, air there would be cleaner.
This has a simple solution. Impose a carbon tax, and let the market sort out who is polluting more and who is providing more value.
Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
Ok that's nice, but it's not enough and now you want to add a bunch of natural gas power plants? Is that going to increase or decrease geenhouse gas emissions?
Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.
That's great, but it's still not enough. We don't just need to drop by 30% of some number, we need to eliminate all carbon emissions and we need to start sequestering the emissions produced for over a century.
Anything less is just insufficient.
...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.
OK, fine, but the DC construction cannot start until the nuclear plant is online.
(now you have two planning permission problems!)
Indeed and frankly we are way behind schedule on building nuclear plants, mostly because of irrational fears about nuclear power safety.
Slow to build, capital intensive. I would have loved a large build out of nuclear 30 years ago. Even now if you get one online more power to you. I just don't see it ever being a major part of the solution now. It's time came and went.
1) how long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?
2) what's the plan for handling the long-term waste, exactly? how many sites are available?
1) Years. I would say reducing carbon emissions is a higher priority for humanity than building more DCs, so building the nuclear plant should be a prerequisite for building the DC.
2) Dry cask storage. It works and it is extremely safe, you can leave the casks on site or bury them wherever you want. The most significant concern with nuclear waste is not the radiation, it is the possibility of radioactive materials leaking into the environment and that is exactly the problem dry casks solve.
2.1) Reprocessing, you can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by recycling fissile uranium and plutonium from spent fuel into new fuel pellets. The remaining waste is typically embedded in glass, which can be placed in dry cask storage (see above).
Nuclear waste is not the problem people think it is. We know how to deal with it and we have been dealing with it for a long time now. For comparison, solar panels do break down over time and solar panel waste includes several toxic heavy metals that can leak into the local environment. Nobody objects to solar power by pointing to the waste stream (let alone the waste created by all those batteries that you need to make solar power useful for industrial operations like DCs).
Imagine we focused this anti-DC energy on things that actually have material impacts, like meat consumption and air conditioning.
I'd imagine it's something like each American eating half as many cheeseburgers a year would offset all current and projected emissions from DC energy usage.
Ok if you can talk Americans into eating half as many cheeseburgers I'll stop complaining about data centers. Seems realistic.
People against DCs seem to be quite keen on regulation. I'm sure someone could come up with a law that would have that effect.
Gosh I sure am glad natural gas isn't a major fuel for grid-based generation, and under contention with residential heating. If that were the case, all that extra demand on a limited resource could drive prices up.
Now you could argue that billionaires, their investors and loan sharks should be allowed to buy up gas —perfectly legal— but it's actively screwing up people's lives.
Cool, then there’s no reason it should be built. Building net new fossil fuel burning infrastructure to power data centers is civilizational suicide.
A nearby town was doing pretty well. Then suddenly on a ton of visible land were built either RV/boat storage places or u-store places. The town feels aweful. Lots of those people able to are moving away because the town just feels bad now. That one move dramatically changed that towns direction/future forever.
> My town is dying. Main street is depressing.
And the data center will probably contribute to it dying faster. It'll produce only a handful of permanent local jobs, and the long term economic output will largely be for rich companies who won't be in your town. Even tax revenue will be tiny because of the exemptions they give it.
Ok. Then natural gas prices will go up, and everyone who heats with natural gas will see their heating bill rise.
I was with you for a while here but you say nobody has an argument, then when someone presents one you say that actually that bad thing is a good thing because we'll react to the bad thing in a good way.
> But if it does that's a good thing. That means we'll need to expand our grid.
Your other points are generally very well-thought-out, but this one is not.
Grid expansions take years. Building new nuclear power plants takes decades. And there's "slack" in the sense that utility prices can raise substantially before there's actually impetus to start planning a grid expansion, and then you still have to wait years for construction to finish.
And the party that takes the hit for those sustained elevated electricity prices is local residents, who in general have far less capital and are disproportionally hurt by it relative to the owns of the data centers.
You can make the argument that the electricity price increases are going to be lower than most people think and wouldn't meaningfully hurt the average local resident, but that's a separate argument. I don't buy that "if it pulls power from the grid that's a good thing" is valid.
If there isn't enough power to meet demand, then build out the grid first, or tax datacenter power consumption so that the inflection pain-point before grid capacity expands is less harmful to the residents.
If building a gas turbine for the data center can be done quickly, then building a gas turbine to expand grid capacity can be done just as quickly. (Barring any poorly thought out, unprincipled regulations that would affect one but not the other.)
Good point.
Now, I'd argue that building has turbines have negative environmental effects, but that's a separate matter.
Burning methane is not a good thing!
The externalities are not paid by the oligarchs who own the datacenter.
If the buildout was solar or wind or even hydro, then you might have a point, but new fossil fuel buildouts should NOT happen in the year 2026!
Apart from the immense greenhouse gas potential, if the wind blows in the wrong direction, you will definitely still get the combustion products. This would be much higher on my priority list than long-term tax revenues.
https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
I wonder how adding gas generators helps this graph go down.
I don't know about this one in particular, but generally data centers seem to be moving to nuclear energy for power generation.
Oh, good. Those will definitely be run safely. /s
Maybe these companies can't prevent their own bots from escaping containment and breaching others' systems, but nuclear is surely easier -- and if there's any issue, superintelligence can mitigate the damage.
By the time any of these nuclear plants come online, The current deferred tech debt apocalypse will have played out. The market is efficient, but the efficiency is very weak. This is no exception.
I really wasn't sure for a second there, which is the sign of a truly excellent, top tier Post. <3
We are also building a nuclear power plant in the county. I'm excited for the growth that's going to bring. The other reply to this comment is uneducated. Nuclear is incredibly safe.
Nuclear plants take over a decade to build. Data centers take a few months or years. New nuclear isn't going to power any data centers for a long, long time.
Not in practice they're not. They want to. But can you actually link to any data centers powered by new nuclear reactors?
There has been a lot of talk about investment/plans for microreactors -- but have any been approved, much less gone into operation?
AFAIK recent data centers are all either:
1. connected to the existing grid, or
2. using natural gas generators
Generally, where?
The natural gas they are burning is being bought from the market and that will more than likely lead to increased natural gas costs.
Only valid point I've heard. We'll see what happens. All I'm saying is the DC is happening. We can't stop it. That'd be illegal. At least we're getting a good deal out of it.
"They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid"
How are they generating that electricity though? If it's fossil fuels, then that's not very sustainable.
In my country the only real concern is electricity. The main reason we attract data centers is cheap, renewable electricity. Now, if the operators really built their own electricity generation infrastructure, the cost of existing electricity wouldn't matter much. So I suspect the plan is to mostly utilize existing capacity, which will drive prices higher, especially when it's not windy. It's not ordinary citizen that are worried, also companies in other energy-intensive industries have voiced their concern. And those industries tend to employ way more people than data centers ever will.
I think electricity needs of ordinary people and businesses that employ them should always come first. Data center operators should be required to build enough capacity to meet the increase in electricity demand. Otherwise it's just modern day colonialism, exploiting our resources without much local economic benefit.
My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)
ps. Have never used tiktok
It feels like a lot of fairly conservative people are realizing they were sold a bill of goods.
Did you research the reasons in favor building it with the same rigor? What was the outcome?
The generation component will absolutely increase costs for communities. Those generators are run on Natural Gas which will draw massive demand on constrained pipelines, drastically increasing prices as demand out paces supply. Mark my words, your power costs as a regular consumer will be impacted by the increased demand of Natural Gas from these data centers
It's okay to just not want or like AI data centers. People don't have to hold a watertight argument against them to oppose them.
And with how secretive a lot of those behind these constructions have been, I think everyone is within their right to crank their cynicism towards data centers to the max.
What a surprise people don’t want massive structures used for shady purposes built by sociopaths, which may or may not use massive amount of power and resources, which may or may not be used to displace the entirety of the labor work force, or destroy what’s left of society to develop better algorithms. To also be built literally in unfathomablr quantities, in almost ever decent piece of land, using unfathomable amounts of money.
Seriously what’s peoples problem?
This is one of those situations where HN is too smart and thinks logic is the same as reality. Life exists outside of computers
You’re being downvoted but you’re 100% right.
The posturing from AI executives has been this will destroy labor. Whether or not that actually happens doesn’t matter - that’s their stance, their dream. They say it basically every chance they get.
Why, then, would average people want to help the people who very plainly state they are against them? It makes no sense.
Everyone here is shocked that average people aren’t willingly to obviously advocate against themselves. Uh, yeah duh. Nobody would.
There’s a lot of well-earned distrust in AI as a whole. The end result is people don’t trust AI companies or their endeavors. This distrust was curated and built by people like Altman and Dario. It didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you want people to support your projects, you have to at least PRETEND you’re on their side. Telling them straight-up “I intend to ruin your life” isn’t a winning strategy. And, everyone, let’s stop pretending like this is our first day on Earth.
Exactly. What, other than buy yacht and cocaine and hooker, are you going to do with all that money, Sam Altman? Pretend we already gave you all the money. What job can my nephews go to school for so that they will have a career 10 years from now? What research institutes are you going to create to hire people to do the remaining jobs, Sam Altman? I didn't vote for you to be the guy that gets to decide but we live under American Crapitalism so that's the direction we're going.
Sure there are a lot of things I just don't like, but the government really does need to have a real reason to regulate things.
The reason is that a majority of the voters wanted to regulate it.
The government is supposed to represent the people, so if enough people don’t like it, then that’s a real reason.
It's all a proxy vote on Big Tech. My town organized against a data center and this is what I saw. People are legitimately frustrated with the tech sector and feel generally powerless to do something about it. But they can vote down data centers in their home town...
It's a Chinese psy-op. There are legitimate reasons to want to regulate data center noise, but that's an eminently solvable problem. The out-of-proportion reaction you're seeing is driven by misinformation.
At this point I really can't see any other justification. The amount of misinformation and hysteria around this issue is like nothing I've seen before.
I think the problem is that they don't control what happens next. The whole premise of AI data center buildouts is basically, "We think we can replace you with a robot so we'll be able to make even more money." So, even if _this data center in particular_ is okay, it's just like saying, "Well, we haven't driven over the cliff yet, so why are you complaining?"
Worse is that there's every evidence that AI is actually just a waste of money, but because there's so much investment in it, we'll all get to lose our jobs when it flops anyway. In the long-term it's just a lose/lose for everyone, and I think people are starting to figure that out. There's general mistrust, because the investors and the implementers are not trustworthy.
Thank you for being one of the few thoughtful responses. I do feel like people's opinions here are more a position on AI in general than this data center. I come from a stance of, "this is happening so we might as well benefit from it"
Well yes. If a car window gets broken in your town, well that's a simple crime. But if entire parking lots full of cars get their windows broken out that's a crime spree and resources need setup in dealing with it.
The issue with incremental problems and quantity problems is you can't point at a single one and go "here, here is the problem" (at least most of the time), you have to look at the entire problem and go "Shit, the paperclip maximizer building one paperclip isn't an issue, it's turning everything into paperclips that's the issue".
And that's where we are.
Ah, but what if you could automate smashing every car window in the city? That would really drive profit to your autoglass business!
(ghost of Bastiat laughs in the distance)
Even better, the company that sold the automated auto glass smasher also sells an automated auto glass installer.
I'm over "this is happening". Like Silicon Valley seems to think it should be implicitly true that their libertarian maximalism should be accepted by the rest of the country. Maybe this is thinking "conservatively" and that's a dirty word, but I don't think it's crazy to ask the capitalists to go back to talking about how their businesses will help normies, and not just steamrolling people with "you can't stop growth". If opposing datacenters makes SV rethink their growth strategies. I'm all for it.
> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
So the farm is no longer there? As in it is using zero water right now?
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
Serious doubt. They will use whichever is cheaper, and that's going to be the grid.
Yes. Oleary bought the farm and there will be no farm there anymore. Using the grid would be good for us too. That's economic growth. There will be short term pain but the increased power use will lead to more jobs. We're already building a nuclear power plant.
Right, so no matter what is done with the land it will be using more water than it currently is.
If we weren't building anything here it would still be a farm using a lot of water. Correct.
Except, of course, that farms use unprocessed water for irrigation and datacenters use treated water for cooling. If the project has its own onsite water treatment, and water rights to the aquifer, then that might be fine, but the majority of these projects expect nearby municipal resources at a scale no farm ever has.
People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living. However, that real goal looks like a tragedy of the comments where everyone is tempted to defect, so people have to pretend to have selfish local reasons to hate the data centers.
>People want to coordinate towards no one building data centers because the purpose of the data centers is to disempower and impoverish every single person who works for a living.
My Hatian neighbors who do gig economy stuff and are totally not running a car dismantling operation on the side would absolutely benefit if all the people who complain about them and are the driving political force behind the rules used to harass them were disempowered and impoverished.
I think they're a pretty extreme example but you see people in situations like this all across the blue collar economy.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
How much?
108 million per year when it's built out and operating at max capacity. For comparison our budget last year was 76 million
Is there a source for this?
> I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here.
i thought personal attacks and perjoratives arent allowed on HN? hmm
It’s might create a massive localized heat problem https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...
You're completely missing the point by assuming the sentiment is associated with that specific data center. People feel powerless about the effect that AI is having on their lives, and these data centers are simply the physical manifestation of it. They want to feel like they have some control over the future they are providing for their children. So, they are grasping at the only lever that they think they have available to them. No economic argument is going to sway them.
I think you're right
>I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here. I've had people ask me if I'm worried that the new data center will spy on me. What?
Are all data centers going to be trouble-free or are you generalizing from this one example? Sorry for the snark, but your n=1 isn't remotely enough to support that claim. I'm not necessarily siding with the people seething at data-centers, but I'm nowhere near convinced that tech bros and company did a good job of avoiding conflict or addressing people's concerns. They helped bring this on themselves. FAFO.
A farm produces food that people can eat. A data center runs AI that takes people's jobs and produces... vibe coded websites that look like trash.
You gotta sell it to the voters and so far no one can because it's garbage they didn't ask for
You live in Snowville?
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
By burning a ton of natural gas. Utah and Idaho both use a decent amount of natural gas for electricity generation. Less of that means that heating and electric costs go up. 9GW is a lot of fuel to burn, it will affect prices.
Otherwise, I generally agree with you. I'm familiar with the area.
The other reason I'd be against it is the air pollution that this will cause, but it won't really affect the surrounding towns as it's at a much lower elevation.
Tremonton. My understanding is they're getting their gas from a Wyoming company that just declared bankruptcy so good for them. The DC will help them out a lot. I look forward to the nuclear plant opening to help with the other concerns.
AFAIK, the reason for the position was to tap into a large national gas line that runs between Utah and Idaho. I'm not sure where the wyoming company would come into play unless they are purchasing the company and resuming extraction operations.
I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.
In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.
I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.
In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
Is it? I haven't looked at this project in particular but I've always heard these dc projects described as having pretty minimal impacts on tax revenue, jobs, etc. Some work for laborers during construction, then only a few full time employees. In addition, the value produced by the facility is not exposed to the community through any kind of tax mechanism. So I'm wondering how beneficial is it really going to be for the town?
You forgot the "provides 200 permanent jobs while threatening and destroy the human race" argument. And the "I don't like a bunch of billionaires controlling politics, manipulating the economy, trying to use the S&P to fund their schemes, then possibly destroying the species as a side effect" argument.
Maybe average people aren't smart enough to read the Anthropic S-1 and conclude "all those 'end the world' risks should be ignored, because Q3 earnings".
Average people are seeing unemployment, rising prices, all the RAM and disks are gone, and Oligarchs controlling everything and saying we will all be controlled, unemployed, poor, or killed. And you're asking why they don't want to support that in exchange for a little more foot traffic, a temporary construction gig, or a few dozen permanent IT roles?
Here's what Anthropic had to say, I think their argument is a pretty good reason not to build more data centers: * Catastrophic species-threatening risks (biological, nuclear, etc). * Massive economic destabilization and disruption * Compute and infrastructure shortages and volatility * Wars and international conflict * Unable to be underwritten by the entire insurance industry * Takeover by governments, use by threat actors * A small band of people trying to get rich and payoff ~$1T in liability by claiming value roughly equal to annual GDP of Canada.
People are pissed that Big Tech/VC/SV has taken over seemingly everything, enshittified it, and enriched the enshittifiers (while the economy has gotten worse for nearly everyone else, and Big Tech's fucking insane leaders have gone full steam ahead at destroying the social contract--literally in some cases by eviscertating whole swaths of the American federal government, and probably illegally at that--and funding the campiagns of those who seek to shield Big Tech from liability.). All this despite having come onto the scene under the guise of "Don't Be Evil" and "Think Different." Data Centers are the most visible manifestation of this ugly side of Big Tech/VC/SV, and ugly in and of themselves; thus, it is not surprising that people roundly reject them. There is (because of the timing of this inflection point--upward--in data centers and inflection point--downward--in economic sentiment/reality) probably also some post hoc ergo propter hoc or temporal-correlation-as-causation going on here too.
The thing is, it takes a pretty coherent worldview of Big Tech, VC economics, politics, etc., to state above as such, so I am not surprised (in a time when education, too, is being destroyed--often by Big Tech itself) most people can't articulate it. 1 in 5 american adults is functionally illiterate, after all.
> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
comparing water for food(?) is a bit crazy to compare water for AI speculation
There are a lot of good reasons to have data center moratoriums and it's so they can be regulated at the federal level and every city has to start at the same starting line. You currently have data centers doing a race to the bottom between desperate cities
Maybe what we need is better messaging from the people building data centers.
WHY do we need infinity data centers? To "win" the AI race? Tell us in quantifiable terms what constitutes "winning."
And we already have 10x the data centers that China has. Can't we pump the brakes a little bit? If not, tell us why not without using vague language.
Finally, tell us, again in quantifiable terms, how building a data center will benefit us. Tell us exactly how many PERMANENT jobs are going to be created, how much tax revenue is going to be created, and let us hold you to it. There HAS to be something in it for us.
Has anyone said they don't like Kevin Oleary? That's usually good enough.
It's a question of what the gain is. The perceived gain is currently zero. So even any tiny risk of any drawback gets a "no" vote.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
This is the crux of the whole thing is it not? People want money into their communities and even more into their pockets:
https://nationalsecurity.virginia.edu/research/what-american...
But not everything turns out fine:
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/richland-p...
Overall it is fine to say that this money will help the community but pretending that everything is going to be fine and others do not understand or that they are "tiktok informed voting block" is kind of low hit.
I think a lot of this can be chalked up to poor regulation. People think it will cause bad effects because the government bodies and processes are not trusted to prevent that.
This is why it's important for government to be built on principles and law, not merely on popular opinion.
From a principled perspective, your neighbor shouldn't get a vote on what you do with your property, except to the extent that what you're doing directly infringes on their own property rights. (I emphasize directly. Noise is a valid complaint. "You're competing against me in the labor market." is not. "You're increasing demand for water in my area." is debatable.) Reducing the whole thing to a popular vote bypasses any such principles of freedom and instead institutes rule by the tyranny of the majority.
While I agree with where you're coming from in general, the surveillance industry has been happily coasting on downplaying and rejecting such principles for quite some time. Principles like freedom of speech, freedom to own things you purchase, privacy from ever-growing surveillance databases, freedom from unaccountable centralized permissions systems based on those surveillance databases, freedom to use computing technology that serves your own interests, freedom to partake in competitive markets rather than suffering monopolies. That general lack of principles (beyond merely centralized authoritarian control) is now coming home to roost, as people oppose these projects due to some vague sense of a lack of individual agency, but perhaps can't quite articulate why.
If their concerns had been acted on to begin with, most of the existing data centers would never have been built as people would be using computing technology under their own control rather than authoritarian-by-design "cloud" traps. So I have little sympathy for the surveillance industry now that the jig is nearly up.
> "It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land.
It uses less water than many other things, too, I'm sure.
But the farm made food. What does the data center create that humans need to survive?
I just made a comment about trade offs regarding pollution and land use. This is another good point. Everything is a trade off. If we use a lot of water to get food we need to survive, or even tasty food we enjoy, that’s worth it. But using up a lot of water for a data center, even if it’s less than a farm? That’s still a valid judgment. Lots of people clearly think that’s not worth it as a trade off.
The farm might not have made food and it might not have made food for human consumption, and even if it did make food it might not be the kind we need to survive. Remember that there are plenty of farms that exist to produce ethanol, HFCS, or inputs for beer/whiskey/etc. makers (which we do not actually need -- drinking is fun but hardly necessary for survival).
Cures for genetic abnormalities: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-discovers-novel-en...
Discovery of Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductors: https://www.vals.ai/blogs/room-temperature-magnetic-semicond...
Diagnoses of things multiple accomplished doctors could not do: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kaw3cv/chatgpt_di...
Every day these days I am thinking thank god for China. They have far saner industrial policy and generally seem to have a saner population.
Humans do not need alfalfa to survive. None of these desert farms grow food that humans eat. Most of it gets exported so americans dont even eat the animals that eat it
I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.
The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.
>"It'll use too much water." - It's going to use less water than the farm that used to run on this land. The county is gaining water from this.
But farms are necessary and datacenters are not.
>"Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I've yet to see this happen, also in the case that it does I really don't want to live near a power plant.
>"Wildlife refuge" - This bird refuge is in Brigham City. The data center will be on the opposite end of the county. Some people seem to think it's right next door.
Probably irrelevant, as people would just build something else that's bad for wildlife.
This is my read of it, I don't really have any special data about the average voter, so feel free to disregard my opinions.
I think the objection to datacenters is not really an objection to the physical buildings and side effects thereof. Like you say, there's not that many downsides to most of these projects.
I think the objection is that people feel like the world is spiritually messed up. Our system's response to these people is "we have AI now, and that's actually going to accelerate things. It's going to be just like today, but moreso! Don't you want that?"
At some abstract level, people don't like the direction we are going in a very broad sense. The fire of modernity is nice to warm you up, but when it gets away and turns into a blaze, people realize that there's something gone wrong.
That there are so many concrete objections trotted out, and that people switch between them at will -- that tells you that people do not like it, but they are having trouble articulating why. Which is fair. It's very difficult to articulate. But people do understand that AI, datacenters, computers, etc are a cause. It's because they are a physical thing. The physical totem of the spiritually bereft online world that big tech has created. It's the online AI slop world people don't like; the physical manifestation of that world is the thing they can concretely object to.
few points: 1. the water usage claim is reported only by developer. However, the developer omitted the fact that more water is also need to cool down the gas power plant. The project reported only water used by the DC directly. 2. so far nothing firm is committed regarding the DC will produce power on site. I would be careful with what developer claims vs. the reality. 3. isn't the problematic refuge around Locomotive Springs? 4. sure, if you live 1hour away from the DC you won't have issue with noise. But what about the communities closer to the DC? 5. the DC is planning to use as much power as the whole Utah, what will happen with the waste heat energy?
The water you cite is groundwater. It does not return in the same lifetime it is consumed at that rate. Gaining in this context simply means losing less than before. Weasel words are exactly why voters reject building AI.
I think you’re too focused on the actual facts. My take: people hate them because they are a physical manifestation of the tech bro billionaires.
This is classic Haidt's Righteous Mind stuff -- people vibe out a moral judgement, then generate rational explanations post-hoc. I'm much more interested in trying to figure out what the vibed judgement is.
I think that part of the problem might be that people don't trust corporations. Sure, they say all that, and that may even be the current plan, but is that how things will actually end up? Will there be consequences "unintended" consequences like polution? Will this be used as a stepping stone to something that is harmful?
Where the rich and powerful are involved, maybe it's better not to take the risk.
The details are definitely fuzzy when you talk to people. At the same time, the sentiment is fairly solid. People do not like AI. They do like food. A farm may use more water, but people want the output of the farm. They don't want the output of the data centers.
That being said, your part of Utah is definitely one of the places were the arguments break down. The actual food production there is minimal. I'm not sure exactly where you are at, but the northern side of the Salt Lake is fairly desolate, and getting moreso. If there was any place where people would be OK with it, you'd think that would be it.
The natural gas burning is a real concern, though. Utah has massive capacity for solar, and when looking down towards Millard county and south of there, geothermal energy. Setting this up as a natural gas fueled data center is a questionable strategy.
I'd pretty much oppose anything Kevin O'leary was involved in, too.
But then what's the implication here? Why would there be large scale propaganda or otherwise effort against large companies who have and make a lot of money? In whose interest is it to get people to dislike the data centers (other than, perhaps debatably, the people themselves)? If its all truly just people being duped, to what end does the naïvete serve?
People are really underestimating how much influence tiktok has over the gen pop.
> It's going to use less water than the farm
A farm produces food. It seems the residents actually understand the issue better.
> They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
That's what they write on the brochure. A sensible stance is to be skeptical, given the [lack of] government regulations, gutting of EPA and big tech track record.
> "Noise"
Stinky swamps don't dampen the disruptive noise to nature. People [should] have a right to preserve the environment they live in.
> "Wildlife refuge"
I think this is the worst in the list. It doesn't have to be half inside the refuge to be destructive.
These all seem to be valid criticisms, without a practical response. Defending such monumentally impactful project needs stronger reasoning.
The farm grows animal feed that is exported. Why should we support that? It provides 0 value for americans outside the farmer doing the exporting and uses a shitload of the water that we desperately need to fill the lake. Im a UT district 1 voter and at this point Ill vote for anyone that bans farming here in UT. Completely unsustainable
I think that a lot of people are more sophisticated than you think, and see data center buildouts as WeWork-style unsustainable growth spurred by speculative fervour rather than business fundamentals.
What does the farm grow? Is it less valuable than what the data center will produce? Because you can't eat data. Utah is full of empty spaces that aren't being put to use (except maybe to set land speed records). Why not use those?
As a Coloradoan I'd be for it since it would save a little water from the Colorado River.
Also as a Coloradoan, if I was a climate denier, I'd be for it since the pollution from its natural gas generators would dissipate before it got to me. But in a state that "has the solar potential to provide all of the electricity used in the United States" doesn't it seem a little ridiculous to use natural gas?
That also helps ease the concerns about tax payers left holding the bag. What do you want to be left with, a few extra watts of solar or a bunch of natural gas generators that wouldn't really be useful?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Utah
If we're talking about the proposed data center near Brigham City, the area is not part of the Colorado River watershed, so the data center would affect other systems but not the Colorado River.
Haha cool. I am firmly against this data-center then. /s
The joke there is that states can't agree to a thing about that watershed and also don't seem to look beyond it when they are making rules. That apparently includes my own tunnel vision.
As a resident of the Colorado River watershed, our inability to negotiate a sustainable plan for the water is one strong reason I support a moratorium on any new water intensive infrastructure (which does not include all data center designs).
> "Noise" - It's an hour away from any structure on a stinky swamp north of the Salt Lake
A major noise concern is the infrasound, which could be a problem even an hour away, since it travels further than regular noise
Not as bad as a center actually inside a community/neighbourhood, of course, but still, probably worth an actual impact study or the like and not just "it'll be fine"
My concern is that so much of what is going on with data centers in general ( and from what I have read, this one also ) is everything that is kept private from the communities. People need to stop acting like the people are not part of the government and don't have a say. We may elect representation, but we are still in charge.
It's the frustrating nature of politics. When an issue first starts to reach the general public consciousness, you tend to see arguments for/against from people who have been thinking about it for a while. As it reaches a wider argument, those arguments get distilled and removed from their context, and they end up being used as liturgy by people who decide on their position first and come up with the reasons second. "Some data centers have wasteful open-loop water cooling systems" -> "data centers waste all our water" etc.
Not only does this end up shutting down good projects, it also puts people in a weird position if they agree with the conclusions but actually think about the reasons. Taking this data center as an example, I would personally be extremely unenthusiastic about a data center standing up its own power generation. It's surely going to be on a smaller scale than a typical power plant and therefore likely to be less efficient and more polluting. The EPA recently stated that power plants not supplying the grid are not subject to certain pollution regulations, so even if the on-site generation could be less polluting, it most likely won't be. This whole idea of data centers bringing their own power generation is so clearly an end run around regulations and proper grid buildout, but that doesn't show up anywhere in your list of objections and I'd bet you didn't just leave it out either. But if I tried to object on this basis, I'd get lumped in with the "uses all the water" people.
I don't trust the datacenter side of the table at all. I don't trust their claims. I don't trust their numbers. We have myriad examples of their lies. Do we have any examples of them being good corporate citizens that offset this?
I don't trust that local communities have any recourse if/when the datacenter changes the terms, violates agreements, poisons the air and ground and water, loses interest and leaves the area to deal with the mess on its own, and so on. Moneyed interests have bought legislators and directed them to quietly advance projects that don't help the local constituents, and then hide behind contract law when what they are doing is clearly bad for regular people.
There is literally zero reason to trust these folks, and every reason to be skeptical. They have shown themselves to be unrepentant bad actors time and time again. Why should we allow any of this without requiring real guarantees and protections for local communities?
It will not bring tax money or permanent jobs to your town. What are the tax offsets that are being promised to developers to get them to build there, and how are these going to help fund local services? The same people responsible for the hollowing out of your rural town are now telling you that they're going to fix it.
If you truly think having a >GW AI datacenter in your town is going to benefit you and your neighbors then I don't know what to tell you. It's like listening to someone tell you about how the stripper really is into him. Good luck
> "Our electrical bills will go up" - They're generating their own electricity and excess power will be put back into the grid
I don't buy this. they're generating electricity for free? the electricity generation comes from somewhere and it has a cost due to any resource used being finite; who is bearing that cost?
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county
in what ways, concretely, once the DC has been built (likely with outside contractors)? it doesn't take much to run one. typically DCs have large tax breaks and so don't actually bring in "a LOT of money to the local county" -- that's one of the problems that people are upset about; your DC might be an exception
I think it's a proxy for something else. Data centers are associated with AI and the AI billionaires were seen with Trump and Musk has his own baggage. Data centers are apparently being built but unless you go look them up online, I doubt most people know where they are even (and I don't know if those maps are accurate). What will happen is the AI billionaires and tech will politically realign and then it suddenly won't be an issue anymore.
No idea why people keep comparing with farm. We can live without data center, but we can't live without food.
> This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town.
How? Is it a tourist attraction?
I mean, we're talking about something that is pretty close to being a lights-out facility with employment for maybe 12 people.
This comment section blows my mind! Are we that insulated from the world? Are these all bots? Am I crazy???
Tech is now viewed in the same lense as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"
Anytime I talk to anyone not in tech they're extremely sceptical of anything tech companies do. Most common reasons I hear as to why is greed, social media destroying children in many ways, seeking political power, and now many parents are concerned their child won't have critical thinking skills because AI is here to think for them.
I don't think they're crazy or obviously wrong. It breaks my heart to hear tech leaders chalk this all up to "AI has poor messaging" as if you say "Our lies have got to be better so we can make the public believe what we want". I've never seen tech so out of touch.
> Tech is now viewed in the same lens as dirty greedy oil companies. If an oil company opened a candy store most people I know would not go because "Oh those oil companies can't be trusted"
That's right, but consider what people would be saying about oil companies on Driller News. Thousands of users here have financial or ideological vested interests in the success of the current crop of tech companies. They can recognize the individual faults of the industry where it doesn't affect their primary interest - such as disliking social media, addictive design and so on - but when you start talking about THE tech golden goose, the criticism dies down.
Who cares what Luddites think?
Usually, people tend to care about what the overwhelming majority thinks, if only to remain informed. I guess branding all dissidents with a derogatory term of your choice and retreating back into the booster bubble is an alternate option.
When people in 2026 are self applying “Luddite” to themselves, then I’m going to start using that term.
And personally I’ve never cared what the majority OR the minority thinks.
That's fine if you want to sit alone in a basement playing with AI models, but the context here is politics and the wider business world. In those domains accounting for the thoughts and needs of other citizens isn't just the morally correct thing to do, it's required to have any sort of sustained success.
Data center companies had some initial wins utterly steamrolling local governments. They sent millionaire legal teams after part time city councils who didn't immediately cave to their demands and it worked for a time. But people notice that stuff, don't like, and will react.
You can ignore the world all you like, but if that's the attitude actual decision makers are going to take with AI things are going to get even worse for them, no matter how many demeaning insults they fling at their opponents.
If you're such a lone wolf then why do you rely upon society to keep you fed and clothed? Why even comment on a social forum if you're so anti-social?
I do.
Ideally the not-luddites, if they want to get anything done.
This argument of “you’re stupid and I’m not” is not a winning one. If you want naysayers to listen, you have to address their concerns. Not pretend their concerns aren’t valid.
What I’m learning from this comment section is that a lot of supposedly smart people have the reasoning and persuasion skills of small children. I mean, really guys?
You’ve told these people that this technology will destroy the labor market and their means of living and you’re actually shocked they might be a little skeptical? Really? Is your brain functioning okay? Did you take your medicine today?
Frankly, the Luddites have been more than generous and understanding with their perspective. The technocrats have been incredibly, unbelievably, unfathomably shit with their posturing and persuasion. Jesus Christ, get a grip.
I predict in the end the Ludds will get steamrollered by progress, same as always. I did enjoy all the name calling though, keep it up. :)
It’s not name calling, it’s the truth. It’s not about your predictions or who “wins”, it’s about understanding and persuasion.
The biggest proponents of AI, the people who created it, who value it most, have stated again and again “this will ruin your life” “this threatens humanity” “you all will be out of a job”.
Do you think that messaging, from the people MOST OPTIMISTIC about AI, inspires confidence in… well… anyone?
Luddites are luddites because you, yes YOU, created them. People wouldn’t be Luddites if their lives weren’t threatened. Of course they’re Luddites!
And, for the record, I’m not a Luddite. I’m just not fucking braindead and understand that, if we want AI to go anywhere, we have to stop making it out to be a world-ending mayday situation.
If you tell people “this will ruin your life” then guess what? They won’t want to support that thing. Congratulations, you’ve just achieved the reasoning skills of the average American five year old.
Now can we all move on and stop sabotaging any sort of progress? The impediment to AI isn’t Luddites, it’s you. It’s AI proponents. Who can’t listen and who can’t understand that making enemies turns you into an enemy.
> This comment section blows my mind! Are we that insulated from the world?
Very much yes, and not on just this topic. I've said it many times over the years in contentious topics (and probably many more I didn't feel like jumping in on), HN is absolutely a filter bubble where most members can't even imagine they're in one.
The thing that gets me is why the hell are these things being powered with loud generators and fossil fuels? These facilities are billed as being 21st century technological marvels. But what's actually delivered looks like something out of the industrial revolution. Harvesting old jet engines from decommissioned planes in order to power your facility? You've got to be joking.
This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.
How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered? The only on-the-shelf low carbon tech with the reliability and deployability we need is nuclear. Any other discussion is just pointless.
> How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered?
A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.
I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.
Neither of those get to the carbon neutral point of the whole endeavor. Just more complicated steps to shuffle the deck chairs around. Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines. The costly part is a political and regulatory problem that is more easily solved than paving over all the farm land with solar panels or strip mining third world countries for lithium.
> Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines.
Oh I see, I didn't realize it was so simple. Let's meet back in a week and we can compare my backyard solar + battery demonstration to your nuclear demonstration.
This is a good example of feeling like I've been transported back in time. A time before people had an answer to the question: How can I use a computer if I've disconnected it from the grid? (I guess that takes us back to 1980)
For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout. If the US were a thinking nation, it would be trivial to ram through solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines. However, we all saw what happened when Massachusetts tried to build power lines to buy power from Hydro-Quebec, for example. It’s entirely a regulatory self own that AI capex is being spent on gas turbines instead of wind turbines.
"For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout"
Got any proof for that statement?
> For the most part, the same people are against the data center buildout and the sustainable energy buildout.
That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it. From where I sit, a major criticism of the DC rollout has been the use of fossil fuels.
> That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it.
I dunno if it's for the most part or not, but it holds true in my experience.
In my home state, there has been a transmission line project planned for over a decade now to take wind power generated in the windy southern end of the state to bring it to the central metropolitan load center.
It's been basically tied up this entire time due to NIMBY. It just recently in the past year or so started to enter the next phase, just in time for the anti-datacenter folks to be added to the NIMBY allied cause to get it blocked again.
It might still happen, but overall green energy from where I stand is something everyone wants in someone else's backyard. In the state I currently live in rural folks protest the solar farms, and pretty much everyone everywhere protests the transmission upgrades required.
My whole life has been consumed with basically no one allowing anything to be built for any reason. It's getting tiring, so taking anti-datacenter concerns at face value is proving difficult to me. Even if I do logically understand many or maybe even most are being brought in good faith.
Polls won't really provide much value on the subject. Plenty of people will say they are in favor of green energy projects - until they are proposed near them.
Supply constraints
Everything is kind of maxed out. The main guy going with jet engines is Musk who got in late after Altman et al had signed up most spare power. In a more sane world the government would regulate it but the current president doesn't seem keep apart from banning the term AI.
Did they reject data centers? Or did they represent the current ownership model behind data centers?
Tech “ownership models” have accelerated the separation of haves and have nots. I’ve wondered if datacenters were regulated such that they become public goods (libraries, power and water infra, etc), if the public would invest more agreeably in them.
Just policy thinking out loud.
I think you mean resent?
And agreed, when people have a problem with data centers, it isn't because of new technology, it's because the data centers represent taking resources (water, electricity, RAM) and power away (work as social leverage) from the people.
What ownership model are you referring to that is tech-specific and why is it in quotes?
Because tech has all the money and all the power these days. They do whatever they want with basically unlimited funds. Big tech has reshaped everything the internet used to be just because they can. Our entire workspace is getting reshaped and who is going to benefit the most? Large tech companies.
Most people feel like they have no say in anything that is going on because a handful of insanely large tech companies are just deciding the future for everyone, and it's in their own best interest- not the best interest of the poeple.
Yeah I'm still not following.
What is Big Tech doing that you think everyone else should have a say in?
Big Tech didn't reshape the Internet...its customers did, by flocking to their products by the billions.
Big Tech isn't reshaping the workforce...employers are, by once again flocking to their products.
He's referring to capitalism / private property.
With more nuance, the oligarchs, shell companies, and wealth inequality that flourishes in less restricted capitalism. The hubris the winners demonstrate, and the belittling of economic losers, are also a significant factor.
Weird place for a lefty to come in. Top comment thread are center-left, you're deep in the euro right/libertarian end of a American centrist comment thread?
(Sorry, I compulsively read the comment history of the right/libertarians. The way their beliefs are glued together fascinate me in a way, it's fun to try to figure out where they are living to the municipal level .. the more one values privacy, the less one should have it, privacy is my "anti-right" of the month, I disagree violently with Acemoglu on free speech as well with somewhat parallel justifications )
> Weird place for a lefty to come in. Top comment thread are center-left, you're deep in the right/libertarian end of a centrist comment thread?
Weird place to come in and dissuade discussions between differing view points. This is at the root of our difficulty in finding compromise and ending the hyperbolic extremes on the left and right.
> I disagree violently with Acemoglu on free speech
In what sense? What is your perspective on his perspective and why it is wrong?
My gaps with Acemoglu et al re: "Building Pro-Worker Ai" is that there is handwaving at how we incentivize augmentation over full automation, and how new jobs and tasks are created.
You're right to try to bridge. But here I think it's too far.
Given that plenty of people voting Republican are also against datacenters, the first libertarians to try to reach for might be the self-funded low TAM business owners or local solopreneurs who actually value their privacy/independence (datacenters being an arm of the surveillance-industry complex)
Acemoglu, later. I need to distill my own thoughts on this, but it's roughly that speech channels should be regulated as a public good like datacenters
Are you familiar with Michael Sandel? The talks between him and Acemoglu are quite good.
> speech channels should be regulated as a public good like datacenters
Who decides what channels and what speech? My understanding is that Acemoglu believes algorithmic driving of speech (up or down) should be regulated, but not speech generally.
I'm playing around with an idea for "tickle up government" whereby local jurisdictions are free to do more experimentation and ideas that work out in practice get lifted up - as opposed to the top-down, domination based ideas coming from the far left and hard right.
No. Cursory questioning of Gemini seems to suggest that Sandel has thought more about the "economics of free speech as a public good". Cool.
>Who decides what channels and what speech?
I didn't phrase that properly. OP of this thread put that thought in my head. Example. Speech is "better" regulated here in HN than on X, Mastodon, Reddit what have you. The who are the mods of course. We have a more effective meritocracy here than USG, meaning tomhow is not too shabby either. But it is topdown
So. Trickle up version of meritocratic mod-selection? Seems like thats what some parts of Reddit do, know any specifics/subs?
This was my first exposure to Sandel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
I'm now reading the book version, Tyranny of Merit
"No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Part IV, Ch. 15, Section 5: “The Strife Between Workman and Machine”
This is exactly what happened in Loudon County. Didn’t matter they’re still mad.
For those questioning this conclusion, 4 of top 10 states by GW of DC under development flipped parties and elected governors that made curtailing DC development or increasing regs part of their platform. That's 130GW of the ~350GW pipeline in the US.
This obviously matters. These states have the leverage. Look at the issues Oracle is having in NM.
https://dcmap.us/insights/pipeline/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/oracle-data-center-force-maj...
The fact that Americans can be made to vote for NIMBY policies was well known. My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
As someone who grew up in a country with near zero growth (some would call it “sustainable growth”) and the resultant stagflation, I wouldn’t wish that feeling of growing into an economy where you can only aspire to take from others, on my worst enemies.
I agree with these voters on almost everything, from the need for more energy and water infrastructure to using this growth to pay for basic needs like healthcare. But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
It seems like we are habituating the American public to just reject that and hope it goes somewhere else (tm) while they get the gains and that’s not how this works.
I think that as an industry, we'll have to make the case persuasively that the datacenters won't hurt quality of life for nearby residents, that they'll have a positive influence on the local economy, and that even more broadly that the benefit from AI is shared and not captured by small group of the ultra wealthy.
That's politics and democracy. People get to vote that, and people that want to make changes have to work to convince the people that the change is beneficial, otherwise they lose.
Why would they have a positive influence on the local economy?
They don’t need more than a handful of people to operate.
I am not suggesting they will. That's a discussion between the communities and the datacenter developers. And the datacenter developers will have a track record they'll be able to stand behind with prior projects, or they'll have to explain why the harms were understated and the benefits were overstated.
For the record, I don't think this is necessarily a positive development for our field or the US. But the solution was one or two years in the past and involved more truthful and principled behavior by the companies developing these projects.
This election speaks for itself in terms of how the population feels about the matter.
How is the profitability of the big AI companies looking? How is their ability to service their debt shaping up?
> somewhere else (tm)
Also known as China, future world superpower. They have enough political continuity to formulate a strategy at national scale and execute on it.
It's crazy how they just keep winning while the US and democracies the world over keep shooting themselves in the foot.
> while they get the gains
The gains continue to flow into the US... For now. I wonder how long that'll last.
>My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
I think they have very rationally concluded there is no economic growth benefiting them in massively consolidated capital building the infrastructure to replace their small businesses and jobs.
How are data centers replacing small businesses? That sounds like a politicians broken speech reader.
They’re literally bringing jobs and paying out the ass, the unions love em [1] and absolutely supercharging local tax revenue, just basic economic growth stuff.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/opinion/data-centers-elec...
Off the top of my head, copywriters, PR researchers, graphic designers, marketers, tutors.
This is the doublespeak that has the public so distrustful: value companies at billions and trillions of dollars based primarily on their ability to replace your workforce, then tell the workforce there will be no displacement. It's insults the intelligence of reasonable people.
So it’s replacing all the useless people?
It’s doing none of this.
Example; my son’s teacher uses AI to make new reading material (mostly graphics), he’s pretty good at keeping quality up and making things relevant to the kids’ real life. But critically without AI, he would not have otherwise hired an illustrator, this is wholesale new economic activity. Not a replacement.
Outside of marketing hype, this is what is mostly happening across the economy. No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
>No AI is going to replace someone who truly was always using humans.
I don't really know what this means. If you need a concrete example, just look at Figma's product roadmap. Look at Fiverr. Your son's teacher is, generally, replacing demand for an educational product with direct production. There was a whole supply chain being replaced with an inference vendor. If you're saying that kind of production doesn't also use generative art, I think you're being very selective.
Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement. The explanation of job market contraction is also replacement. The electorate are responding in their own interests to what they are being told.
“ Anyway, economic analysis aside, the pitch for AI is replacement”
That’s a headline read of the situation on the ground is what I’m saying. The frontline is a lot more complex than just a 1-to-1 replacement.
My sons teacher still regularly uses library books (that regularly buys published books), now he can just add a story about his cats visiting the firehouse, cats the kids have met, hyper personalized and made more relevant, a market created totally new and replacing nothing in place.
Figma is on a hiring spree, just FYI, to drive my point home. This is pure pie growth.
On the ground, I have definitely replaced peoples' income with AI spend. If you haven't, or aren't even aware of it having happened, I think we're coming from meaningfully different places.
Company with a growing market got a productivity improving technology and decided to reduce their headcount? That seems...counter productive. The natural response would be to get more customers and grow.
Short-termism is always a thing I guess, but these companies just end up hiring different people (who can use the AI better) down the line, which is in line with my conclusion.
One example of someone doing something they otherwise would not have does not support your incredibly strong claim of:
> it's doing none of this
They are not bringing in jobs. They employ very few people.
> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
The people I’ve spoken with don’t want data centers in anyone’s backyard, park, grassland, unincorporated township, or wasteland. Not just a NIMBY thing. The voters want big tech to make do with what they already have. Voters don’t have to imagine what economic growth looks like—that’s an exercise left for the innovators. They do get to imagine what it does not look like, and unrestrained data center buildouts are not that future.
Voters should stop using AI then.
As a GenXer, I cannot believe the number of GenZs I have met who have done exactly that. I need to find some polling, but it gives me hope.
I'll wait until they are forgoing it while occupying most knowledge jobs.
It's easy to skip out on AI when you are a waitress or cashier.
Don’t mistake the voters for their employers.
I don't know what world you are in, but it doesn't seem like a whole lot of people are, which is why there is the antagonism.
It's mostly just a punchline for stuff once you step outside of HN and such..
Give them a choice (as in stop stuffing it into every app and service they use) and you might be surprised when they do.
"that’s an exercise left for the innovators"
Are you saying AI is not innovation or that the public needs a permanent veto on what is and isn't viable innovation?
> My question is what Americans think economic growth in the 21st century looks like?
Maybe it looks like a reduction in monopolies, increased competition, lowering of prices as automation pays dividends, and a general de-consolidation of power.
It doesn't look like 4-companies owning the whole stock market and incumbents using AI to cut every worker they can with no longterm plan, using AI to deny insurance claims, and rig the deck in the most unconscionable uncompetitive ways they can.
There are outcomes much worse than "flat" if we aren't careful, and even the AI CEOs say as much.
I think this is missing the issue. It's not the cranes and walls that bother people, it's the tech companies. They've shown themselves repeatedly to be bad faith and exploitative actors. Now they're asking to move in. It's easy to understand why people are saying no.
And that's even before we consider the impact of LLMs themselves. Personally I expect LLMs to create tremendous growth, but that should be highly counter-intuitive. They're going to absolutely wreck cognitive labor; society entering into an era of deteriorating wages for cognitive work as well as increase unemployment is quite likely. My prediction is based on 'what comes next' but if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month, this is all going to be, again understandably, seen as pie in the sky.
>> if somebody's only concerned about paying rent next month
If this is true wouldn’t it be nice if the municipal budget had some room to manouver? [1]
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2026/09/19/700-bill...
Let me translate this for how a person negatively affected by this is going to see what you're saying:
'We are regularly deceptive and unadulteratedly self interested. Now we're going to create a catastrophic problem for you, one that is reasonably likely to be unprecedented in scale, because we deem it to be profitable for us. But don't worry, we promise to throw you a bone in the future to make it a bit more tolerable. Deal?'
“catastrophic problem”
I mean this framing is 100% media/algorithmic feed driven. A forest fire burning down your house is a catastrophe, can we get some perspective?
This just feels like slopulism at this point.
I can generally see any genuine viewpoint relatively easily, but I'm having a lot of differently understanding what could possibly lead you to view things like this. Do you genuinely not see that LLMs are very likely to cause significant damage to all forms of cognitive employment?
This outcome is exactly what's driving the multi-trillion dollar valuations. The idea is that companies will be able to eliminate much of their labor and replace it with LLMs, LLM companies will rug-pull and investors get rich(er). A nice way of phrasing this is 'increasing the productivity' of companies' remaining labor forces, but it's the same outcome regardless of framing.
My optimism comes from what happens after this, but there's a high probability of rough waters on the horizon for a very large chunk of the labor force, before we enter into a new equilibrium. Trying to imagine things are just going to stay roughly the same is, in my opinion, just not a realistic view at all, almost regardless of the assumptions you make.
And given how non-independent society is now a days, shaking things up like this will likely have an unprecedented impact, even if the shaking was probably more severe from previous revolutionary leaps.
I don’t deny the transition is rough, difficult and panic inducing . What I ask is for those of us who have historical perspective, we understand that this is just another productivity jump in a chain of many since the Industrial Revolution and that categorically over a decade we will all collectively be wealthier as has been proven time and again. There is zero evidence that “this time is different” just because it’s cognitive activities being automated.
With this historic perspective we know we’ve gotten through this before and we can do better this time. More generous unemployment benefits, better retraining methods, these are all on the table.
What we shouldn’t do is give in to panic populism. We live in a representative democracy not a direct one precisely so representatives can balance the needs for growth, innovation and real across the board wealth creation over a more popular stagnant jobs program.
Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well. The real catastrophe would have been banning electricity distribution grids even though that’s what the rioting lamplighters demanded.
You're all over the place. So right now you're agreeing that there will be a catastrophe which will be 'rough, difficult, and panic inducing.' And this is what people want to avoid, especially when the short-term to mid-term solution comes down to a mixture of relying on big tech and big government. I refuse to believe that you can't understand why people would do anything to avoid this. The companies deploying these buildings certainly do. There's a reason that a substantial chunk of the jobs created by datacenters involve guns!
Never used the word catastrophe, panic can be induced without one. But it doesn’t seem like this conversation is fruitful. Obviously people want things.
The people want zero taxes, 100% services and a $10,000 tax rebates. But turns out you can’t give them that. Stopping new technology diffusion so that panic isn’t induced is no different an ask.
My post was about what we should do instead.
I'm not trying to play gotchas. I'm trying to figure out what in the world your logic is and you seem to keep shifting it every single post. So now you're back to claiming it's nothing but defacto hysteria while in the post prior you were acknowledging that there would be widespread rough and difficult times, significant disruption to employment, and more.
Assuming you're human, this makes me think that you don't actually have any logic for your position and are instead ad hoc formulating an argument after picking a desired conclusion, rather than logically working your way to a conclusion.
It's not that complicated, if you see all help from the government as a "big government intervention" then yes, the thing you are panicking about will come true.
I don't think most people see it this way, and if we can expand government help to help people transition through career upgrades then the thing people are panicking about need not come true.
This is not going back and forth, there is real tumult, but damage can be avoided. And I think we should communicate that reality clearly instead of offering a public veto on all new technologies.
I just don't think you're engaging in good faith. You're now calling people getting forced out of their jobs and onto various government assistance programs a 'career upgrade' that's nothing to worry about. That's so absurdly out of touch that I refuse to believe anybody genuinely believes this.
I literally said retraining (you know..to get the upgrade). Don’t think I’m the one arguing in bad faith.
Quoting myself again
“Utility workers are 10x wealthier than lamplighters and that same job transition is coming to cognitive work as well. The real catastrophe would have been banning electricity distribution grids even though that’s what the rioting (see: “panicking”) lamplighters demanded”
PS: 90% sure you’re a troll bot mostly because you’re highly engaged with how I’m arguing as opposed to what I’m arguing. Just FYI for anyone else reading this.
I'm only engaged with what you're arguing. The problem is that it keeps overtly changing from post to post, often in mutually exclusive ways. And now you're leaning heavily into completely absurd euphemisms. Nobody's getting a career upgrade from this, let alone because of government programs. That's akin to telling coal miners go to learn to code. And again I refuse to believe any human would believe this.
Fortunately, unlike you, I have the empathy to understand other people's arguments, I know the concept of upskilling is:
a) counter-intuitive
b) change, and therefore scary.
But historically this has played out the exact same way and there is no evidence that it won't play out the same way with AI.
You're ignoring the examples I'm giving you (lamplighters), so I'll use yours: When automation came to coal mines, the coal miners became coal extraction machine operators.
I'm curious now how you'll claim again that I've "overtly changed" my argument: Change is hard, but can be managed.
Most of every humans knows that the issue for coal miners was not about better tools, but about their job being made obsolete, similar as what LLMs are already starting to do, and will likely do to a much greater degree in the future. Coal miners didn't become 'coal extraction machine operators' - they became unemployed.
Countless lives were completely destroyed in spite of 'government retraining' promises. Those who carried on managed to do through some menial labor and other jobs, many with even worse conditions and for worse pay. For instance trucking was a fairly common new profession - where you're away from family pretty much all the time, and getting paid even less. It's a horrible job, but it's the sort of work that was left for them.
I'm opposed to NIMBYism 99% of the time, but these data centers aren't being opposed for no reason. There's stories coming out all over the country of negative impacts on communities and backroom deals with local officials who sign NDAs during negotiations. There's a goldrush on in the US to build these out and when that happens companies run roughshod over communities.
Data centers take resources, land, and ways of life from rural communities to give economic growth opportunities to people in cities without paying those rural communities.
> But when push comes to shove, for growth, the cranes have to show up in your neighborhood and build stuff.
There is absolutely no need for cranes to show up in or near existing neighborhoods to build data centers. The US is not out of remote land that would be well suited for this purpose, but building in those places requires spending more money to build supporting infrastructure, so businesses prefer to avoid that cost.
If the growth is truly beneficial, it should be able to pay for itself, and I think that is what people want to see enforced.
Why are you upset that citizens have a right in how their communities are developed? Do you not understand that a majority of people do not care about helping capitalists get slightly richer and would rather have a life of quiet dignity?
Why should we believe that we will meaningfully benefit from that economic growth? We aren't benefiting much now. And if we won't benefit then why should we care about it?
Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone, and protecting the environment and ecosystems for long-term sustainability. I’m not even remotely convinced we need ‘number go up’ to make this happen - if anything, the hyper focus on “economic growth” seems to run counter to equity and sustainability.
“ Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs”
As I pointed out, I lived in a country that answered this question exactly like you wanted. It was like living in a country where every institution from the college to the coffee shop was the DMV. It works..just about. But it sucks.
I think you’re conflating a lot of things here - economic growth (or lack thereof), highly developed infrastructure, my idea of a society focused on “meeting real human needs”, and probably more.
Honestly, I don’t know what more to say than my original question: What do you even mean by “economic growth”? Unless you define that, we’re all going to be talking past each other. It’s not obvious (at least to me) that any mainstream definition of “economic growth” has much to do with poor institutions, particularly once those institutions are developed.
>> "What do you even mean by “economic growth”?
Most businesses (and institutions in general) have more customers tomorrow than they do today, thats economic growth to me. If that doesn't happen, they stagnate, stop investing, innovating and moving forward. The internal incentives get weird and lopsided, lots of infighting starts, and generally all processes slow down (see; DMV).
There is simply no way to "meet real human needs" without economic growth.
You can to a certain extent take from one and give to the other to meet some needs, but that's it, you're just cutting tinier and tinier slivers of a pie that as you specifically said has stopped growing.
> Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone,
For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.
Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.
Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.
Does economic growth look like companies firing hundreds or thousands of employees in batches because they are replacing them with AI? Because that's what people are seeing in headlines. That and mass surveillance.
There are a set of data centers that got built where local laws were (and continue to be) broken. Messaging from the data center builders is that accepting their will is inevitable and they are above regulation. Given these, it is an entirely reasonable position to ask for a complete halt.
This doesn't happen when UPS opens a distribution center or CVS opens a store because everybody knows UPS and CVS are bound by local laws. That cannot be said of e.g. SpaceX, so the only play is to keep them out, full stop. Nobody wants a neighbor who is above the law.
This will encourage developers to put these facilities in more human-friendly places. I knew the clock was ticking when xAI started expanding aggressively in suburban Memphis. These facilities are loud, they emit pollution (when power is generated onsite), and they need very little staff. After the initial construction there is zero upside for the local community. They should be located away from population centers.
more likely they'll get built in different countries with more lax regulations. This is probably going to end up like manufacturing where it's all done overseas.
Datacenters contain few jobs so unlike manufacturing this doesn't look like a loss.
Property taxes are a significant contributor to the purse of many cities and counties, and datacenters are expensive real estate in terms of the assessed valuations. Sales tax also.
For some cities and counties this will be a loss if those developments move.
Not appreciably in most municipality so far, I guess what your saying is nice in theory but isn't being born out in reality in the simple majority of places.
I would take a wild guess that data centers have a pretty mediocre assessed value, and of course they have even less of an employment base than a typical warehouse or factory.
In some states (Texas) data centers are getting significant tax breaks. I (in Texas) on the other hand have seen my property tax rise about 700% in the last 10 years.
Texas is giving data centers more than $1 billion in tax breaks each year : https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/08/texas-data-centers-s...
I’m a progressive through and through, but this is the one aspect of the whole platform I don’t like. I am in the build data centers everywhere, make tokens dirt cheap, and work as hard as possible to make models more and more intelligent camp. The only thing I would like to see is that we keep building massive data centers, but mandate that they have to be powered by their own newly built solar, wind, and battery banks. This would let us keep our lead in frontier models, as well as building out brand new sources of green energy. I believe Massachusetts (?) has already passed legislation that accomplishes this.
Unfortunately the hyper scalers decided to aggressively shoot themselves in the foot by following the Amazon HQ2 approach of making cities compete and signing deals in the dark under NDA. They became symbols of grift and corruption and undemocratic strip mining of communities for resources because they figured they could culture war their way out of any consequences. It's very stupid because there's no way this is worth it financially for them given how much backlash it generated. Given how hyped unions were/are about data center construction just showing up as a good neighbor and not being an asshole would have kept public support but somehow they didn't realize how much the generally positive impressions of tech the public used to have were worth in soft power and just how much value they were throwing into the trash by nuking it.
Just make sure they keep doing what they’re doing but redirect that gently into building out their own renewable power along with their data center.
I saw first hand the Port Washington, Wisconsin data center build and spoke to a guy working on the project. As he points out, the pay is the best he's ever had, but as construction is always boom and bust, he was under no illusion that it would last forever.
Dump truck divers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, and many other construction trades were benefiting within a 2-hour radius of the site.
Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities. Clearly they must be built correctly, but the cash injection to workers pockets must be a welcomed addition to local families.
> Feels like the closest thing we will every see to big tech companies investing in local communities.
When the data center is built and the dump trucks leave, what is the ongoing benefit for that community?
What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development with similar land and resource use? It seems to me that datacenters have low ongoing employment requirements compared to those resources used, and that many of the benefits of running the datacenter aren't gained by the local community but rather by businesses located far away.
> What is the opportunity cost of building that datacenter compared to different kinds of development
Is there another group that's lining up to build stuff on that land? Should nobody ever be allowed to build on any land unless it's being used to the maximum possible utility?
He should be asking permission from the city council and state before doing any change in his garden or house. He must not add a new light in his bedroom without first going through a city wide vote.
Everybody (except apparently you) can see that's not the same thing.
It is not as if data center development is suddenly ended. Democrats have paired up with tech in the past. Tech might want to make friends with those that hold the purse stings. Regulatory capture is still in the cards. Projects on the way are still on the way.
It might be that tech would like some regulations / laws that slow data center development (maybe a good thing) if they think it has just turned into an arms race that has gotten out of hand. Investors might think this also (S&P 500 up ~1.5% as I write this).
Regulations just mean Democrats get to pick the winners, which will most likely match donations.
Which is what Republicans were already doing, while agreeing to NDAs that kept their constituents in the dark.
With the mandate from voters, hopefully we see less secret development and more open communication about the deals being cut.
I am a little hopeful here in Texas. We have needed change for a while. Still, we are talking about politicians and while there maybe be a mandate from voters it is a long and narrow road to solutions that are good for everybody (especially the constituents).
The nice thing about politicians is they can be held accountable by constituents, per the Constitution.
Data center developers, who should be equally distrusted (but seem to get a pass), are not beholden to you.
It will take developers and politicians working together to find a solution, rather than let developers do whatever they can to maximize profits without regulation or public process.
> Tech might want to make friends…
They might find that tricky after they sold out to right wing causes last election.
And while before you could say well money overrules everything, they outspendint Democrats like crazy and still got wiped out. So if you want to keep your job as a politician suddenly more fundraise no longer means more advantage
But the money was going to the Republicans, who did what they were told. The money may not actually win the election but it can (not always, but it looks like often) buy politicians.
> Democrats have paired up with tech in the past
Yeah, and both their politicans and constituencies were directly betrayed by them. They made their bed and now they must sleep in it. Many of the dems who won made data centers and AI a part of their platfrom.
Negative sentiment on data centers is bipartisan. It’s incredibly strong right now.
Regulatory capture won’t save the tech industry if they can’t improve public sentiment.
They’ve been talking down to the average person, doom-bragging about the existential crisis of AI to juice investors, and people like Sam Altman have been generally been acting like Bond villains.
I think their shortsightedness has backed them into a corner of a potentially highly regulated environment where building a data center is harder than building a chemical plant.
You mean like the Democrats were so hard on the financial industry during / after the Occupy Wall Street movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
The Democrats are just politicians and Americans will have to keep there focus if they want things done.
What you’ve brought up is a non-sequitur.
The polling is clear, both sides of the aisle are negative on data centers:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/22/americans...
https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/opposition-to-lo...
> Majorities of Democrats (69%), Republicans (54%) and independents (53%) oppose new local data centers. Opposition is highest among young adults under 30 (70%) and declines to 57% among those 65 and older, the inverse of what one might expect for a new technology
I do not think it is to much of a non-sequitur but I do hope you are right.
I guess it’s possible that it could be turned partisan, and in that case it’s not a non-sequitur. I just see it as less likely than with Occupy Wall Street.
I’m not sure that the right is currently able to offer an offramp for people with frustrations or opposition to data centers like the Tea Party offered for Occupy Wall Street.
I also see it as an issue where their construction overwhelmingly impacts red districts, since they tend to be built where land is cheap where suburbs border rural areas.
I'm all for data centers so long as they pay market rates for water and electricity.
Yes. And are not exempted from existing pollution regulations.
The data centers will pay market rates. The thing is the market rates will be higher- and that affects regular people.
A household can’t compete with a data center on electricity/ water prices. So households will have to pay more.
Lol. You don’t think these data centers affect market rates?
Are those same voters going to roundly reject steel mills or semiconductor fabs, which have a similar land/water/electricity footprint?
Those will likely create lots of jobs. Local industry is good.
Mostly yes. Everyone would also prefer that steel mills semiconductor fabs get built somewhere else, where they personally don't have to deal with any of the externalities.
But these voters don't know about that. They only care about what social media memes told them to care about.
I don't know why people voted for this. Probably something to do with all the big tech CEOs visibly paying bribes and tribute to the corrupt and massively unpopular president. I doubt the anti-data-center backlash is as extreme without that.
But also just NIMBY. No one likes to live near industry.
To get this big a backlash, you need a variety of reasons to oppose that appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Inevitably some of those reasons will be silly (a lot of people talked themselves into voting for a 2nd term for Trump, after all!).
How do the jobs and local economic benefit compare between a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, and a datacenter?
Are companies proposing steel mills and semiconductor fabs directly adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods?
Will those developments pay for the required infrastructure expansions, or get special deals to waive those costs in return for building in that community?
That's what happens when you are building something too fast and affects negativity the local economy. I personal doubt this data centres are really the issue. But we got what we paid for.
I don't think data centers are directly the issue either, but a proxy for feelings about the LLM era in general.
FUD spread from competing nation states is where it all originated from. Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began. If you live in a medium to large city goto google maps and search for "datacenter" in your town, i bet you live within 5 miles of one that you've never even noticed before.
There's even debate about the one being built outside of Amarillo Texas, next to the freaking Pantex site (where all the US nuclear weapons are assembled). Like, opposition to it makes no sense at all hence the reason why the Pantex plant is there. There's nothing within 100 miles to affect (except nuclear warheads i guess) yet there's a debate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
edit: let me add that the price of natural gas in TX is effectively zero.. or may even be negative. There's plenty of energy available. Now, availability of turbines to convert those chemical bonds to eletricity is another matter but the gas is there.
The true price of gas power production is the externalized cost of its emissions, which is currently not reflected in the market price but instead paid for by all of humanity.
Natural gas power production is by far the cleanest and most available for this use case. Nuclear would be better but can't be brought online fast enough. Solar/Wind would be best but there's not enough yet either and behind the meter generation isn't even feasible. All things considered, natural gas is the best fit.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
> Remember, no one gave a shit about datacenters until the AI race began
That's because before the AI race began (1) no one was trying to build more data centers in a couple years than had previously been built in the entire history of civilization, and (2) the new data centers are an order of magnitude bigger than pre-AI race data centers.
Also (3) the people involved in those data centers were not also constantly bragging that they would use the data centers to replace everyone's job guy for pennies on the dollar.
I'm from Argentina and I was getting Ads on twitch about how datacenters are good for local economies in Indiana.
Wonder how much money the burned.
I'm sure there was a "spray and pray" attitude, but also some stunning incompetence... Republican PACs spent a lot of money advertising for a candidate who was running in Portland, Maine... in Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country.
This issue is really difficult.
Although public opinion is against it, the opposing voices within public opinion are also different.
It's impossible to satisfy everyone, and there must be trade-offs, but when it comes to exactly how the details should be handled, it seems that everyone can't reach a consensus either.
But I'm very curious, if all the construction were moved to other countries, what would public support be like then?
Currently, part of the reason for construction in various states comes from "Made in America."
For example: TSMC (sorry, I'm Taiwanese).
I'm not very sure, but I hope to hear more voices.
US is happy to ship toxic manufacturing, and even plain old garbage, offshore. They wouldn't bat an eye at DCs moving.
I wonder which enterprising Caribbean country will figure out how to make data-sovereignty laws attractive such that no one cares about data moving outside of the US.
Darn right! Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone can see any value in this, except those at the top. Yes, LLMs make us more efficient in SOME cases, but does that improve life for the average man or even average programmer? Or even the end user, who has to deal with more AI-generated ads and scams now?
The only end benefit seems to be that more people can make more software now, and it's not even clear that this will be a good thing in the long run, considering how much technical debt we're accumulating.
That hundreds of hackers can complete a few neat hobby projects doesn't really count as a serious benefit, by the way.
If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?
For a random non-software example: My mother has an HR job and absolutely loves it for working with spreadsheets, sorting through email, making mail merges, reviewing the policy documents for errors as she works on them, and so on. She spends less time in document hell and more time getting things done or talking to people.
Personally, I find the ability to quickly remove technical debt to be more practically valuable than the ability to quickly create software. A lot of the smaller shops I work with never had the time or money to properly manage, update, or retire their infrastructure. Now many are in a better shape than my own stuff has been because you don't need to be an uber nerd spending a weekend to upgrade an ancient & neglected MediaWiki box (or whatever) anymore.
> If you need to start adding exceptions before you've finished your comment then it seems it must not be hard to come up with how someone can find value in it?
I only added it because I don't consider that use case a valid exception and I'm just anticipating that sort of comment.
Overall I do believe it is a productivity win for software. However, the insane amount of money spend on AI (training models, building datacenters and even usage in some cases) is ridiculous. Hopefully that will get lower soon.
In the past few weeks, I have used AI assistance to...
...track down a piece of music I wanted to hear again, based on a description of its general vibe and the single line of the lyrics I could remember
...compare the weather resistance between various models of temporary carport
...figure out how to get the last stubborn bolt out of a snowmobile engine I was trying to remove (hidden underneath, behind a covered access panel, it turned out)
...design a costume I want to make, from a vague concept through inspiration pieces to specific details to a complete design sketch I can use to draft the sewing pattern
...apply a voice-over to a piece of video using kdenlive
...find a replacement ATV master cylinder which is cheaper than the OEM part
...fix an annoying string buzz on a mandolin
...locate the procedure for getting the city to plant a street tree in front of the house
...recommend a show I haven't seen which would fit the mood I was in
...make a recipe for a dish I wanted to cook, combining elements from two different variations I found online, modified to accommodate the ingredients I actually had
...evaluate all the second-hand welders available on the local craigslist based on their suitability for a certain project I want to tackle
...plan a last-minute night out in a city I don't know very well
...find replacement glass to fit a ceiling light fixture, from a picture of what I had and a description of what I wanted instead
...suggest some music not already in my library which would fit in with a certain playlist
...find out how parking works at an airport I was about to visit
...figure out why my motorcycle wasn't starting reliably
...find a plumber capable of solving an issue with an antique clawfoot tub
...learn how to assemble a DIY meshcore radio kit which came with no instructions, by taking pictures of the parts
I could continue, but I believe the point is made.
I think what we're seeing is that a lot of people wonder, if making the lives of wealthy people with a lot of leisure time more convenient is worth the societal tradeoff (even if they're in this category themselves)
I don't understand what you mean; which wealthy people are you talking about and what does their convenience have to do with the general utility of AI tools? The person I responded to seemed to think that AI tools were only useful for developing software, which struck me as a limited perspective.
The preliminary economic assessments agree; AI has not produced generally higher productivity, higher profit margins or growth boosts: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...
AI is the next evolution to youtube university and will enable people to own homes that were previous not able to because of the skill needed to fix them. Help them repair their car and lower the ever growing bills for autoshops. The list goes on and on.
I don't think building huge datacenters to make a priveleged person like yourself have an even easier life is a worthy use of all the energy and space that could be used for wild nature.
I bet if AI actually starts making visible-to-patient progress in curing diseases, data centers will be welcome with open arms.
All it takes is for one state to grant AI narrowly-scoped medical licensing to treat various things human doctors are allowed to treat telephonically.
They won't, because we'll still have no money to pay for healthcare as a result of AI taking our jobs. To the contrary, right now the rational choice is to not allow these AI farms to be installed so that many of us (this is not only about the US) still have access to a decent lifestyle (including decent health, that is).
AI should be owned collectively and we should all benefit from the loss of jobs. It was trained on our data and has no value without our labor, so it is our rightful property.
We both know that that won’t ever happen.
> benefit from the loss of jobs
This will only benefit some part of the present ruling-class (and partially some of their tech-minions putting those policies in effect)
Unfortunately people have no difficulties having completely contradictory and absurd views. Understanding of the concept of a supply chain or dependency web is also quite weak.
A lot of noise, pollution, resource usage, power sound problems etc can be easily solved. The one that I think people are frustrated is the wealth inequality and data centers are directly seen as making few people insanely rich while their lives are not improving whatsoever. I don't see a solution to this yet.
What can be done about the noise? I keep thinking about this meeting in Carroll County, KY about 1 week ago where residents confronted county officials by playing recordings of the data center noise ongoing onside their homes. [0][1]
> “You guys have made your point, okay,” Nab tells the local residents.
> “But we have to live with this now!” they urgently respond.
> “Oh, ya have to live with it?” Nab shoots back, smirking as he speaks.
> “Yes we do!” the locals reply, as other townies chime in. At one point, a security guard jumps in and warns everyone to act like “adults.”
The near open mocking of residents as they grapple with persistent noise is what bends me the wrong way.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/resident-screec...
[1] https://www.wkyt.com/2026/10/29/carroll-county-residents-pla...
Can we not build it far from any residential area?
We could, but that would cost slightly more and the richest people in the world hate anything that would make them slightly less rich.
Huh? What is the solution for higher electrical bills? Build more power plants? Who will pay to build these power plants? The AI companies?
Some of them are bringing their own power no? My point is, I can see possible ways to solve this. The only thing we cannot solve easily is how it creates wealth inequality
Ofcourse they can be solved. But companies like to cut corners because of money. They don't want safe or clean they want cheap.
Has anyone done an analysis of how these laws are defining "data center"? Anyone accidentally ban having a rack of servers on an office closet? That could suck for a lot of small businesses. I'm all for local autonomy, but knee jerk local laws can also be... messy.
I haven't seen a broad analysis, but every specific one I've looked into accounted for your concern and defined some sort of minimum size or power draw.
They never do that in the "first round". Usually you gotta wait for a compliance industry to spring up and then they inevitably lobby for the definition of people who need to pay the compliance industry to get watered down. It's just the natural incentive creep of the system.
I would be surprised if a rack of servers in an office closet could realistically draw 25 megawatts of energy, which is generally the cutoff that these local ordinances use to define a "data center". Keeping in mind that the cost of commercial electricity alone for powering even a 1 megawatt data center continuously for 1 month would have to be at least 100,000 dollars, right?
Laws are public, you are welcome to go read them. All of the ones I've read define it based on [x] megawatt of compute or similar. None of them are banning a rack of servers in a closet.
In Ohio: 25 megawatts. $2 million/month in electricity, call it $750m of hardware, plus the building.
This is not going to affect small businesses.
Getting people to vote against building anything is easy, of course when people start complaining about lack of housing, or a failing economy its quite a bit more challenging for them to recognize how regulation (that they may have voted for) led to those issues.
I doubt a lack of AI data centers is going to lead to a failing economy.
Anything with a whiff of data centers were squashed. Here in Rhode Island there were rumors that the economic development ballot question was so vague that it could end up being a data center.
How unrealistic are modular data centers with battery and solar built in, with no need for liquid cooling?
Something that can be trucked in with no negative effects on local populations
From my time at hyperscalers ... realistic for low power traditional DC (lot of regular rackmount CPU server) ... unrealistic for the power and cooling requirements of inference and crypto mining
Many of the votes are not full ban on DC but ban on massive energy dense DC
> with no negative effects on local populations
Fan noise unfortunately
AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, META are all up 3 - 7%! Huh.
NVDA is down a couple %, ORCL is mostly flat. It’s the neoclouds that have taken the most beating, down 10%+
I wonder if people know who the data centers are for…
Winners from this off the top of my head...
- Every existing data center just became much more valuable
- If "data centers in space" actually work then their value just grew significantly
Data centers in China, more likely
If datacenters in space becomes a thing, we will then learn that the rockets that launch them release neurotoxins into the air, and call for an immediate moratorium on rocket launches.
Anyone with the care to pay attention to what is going on realizes that the pushback on DCs has nothing to do with DCs, and everything to do with fear about AI.
> we will then learn that the rockets that launch them release neurotoxins into the air, and call for an immediate moratorium on rocket launches.
yeah, from tiktok no less.
I had an electric bill of $200 before an AI Data Center was built near me; after that, I got a $559 electric bill. Some people turned off the power to their old house for sale and got a $250 electric bill. People seem to think the Data Center is not paying its fair share of electricity and is passing the costs on to households.
Related:
Data Centers on the Ballot
https://datacentersontheballot.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50361608)
We had a clown running in our local election who had "no data centers" on their election signs. The area they were running to control is the last place you would ever want to put a data center. This clown won. Politicians use this to fool stupid people.
> Politician promised "no data centers". District was unsuitable for data centers anyway.
On the bright side, here's a politician who can keep their promise.
Yep same as GOP using trans panic, women in men's sports, Haitians eating cats and dogs, gender reassignment surgery in schools. These things aren't real issues but it works.
If you don’t give people buttons to say no to AI, they will use ballots instead.
Bad news for the rest of the world, because you all will export this problem to us.
What is sad is we've been building data centers for decades without problems.
Some near me have wetlands around them and the houses bordering them are very desirable.
Seems like some bad apples ruined it for everyone.
The difference is that these AI data centers use significantly more power on a per-rack basis (and thus requiring much bigger backup generators) and generate much more heat (requiring much more cooling) than the data centers of old.
The literal pitch these guys have been using is:
* We've built a technology that has obliterated entry level hiring
* That technology might obliterate all the other "normal" person white collar jobs. The kinds of jobs you can clock in and out and not think about them outside of that. Instead, every new job will be a managerial one working with 500 agents.
* Loaning all the money to build these data centers and train these models costs so much it cranks rates through the roof, so we've frozen the real estate market and nobody can move or buy in
* The past 10 years of American politics have been defined by how the last time we did a broad replacement of labor event like that for a group of people. Their standard of living permanently shrunk (the NAFTA disrupted working class), and we may end up doing that to you guys again. The only solution is that the government is going to have to do some sort of UBI or redistribution (which the last time they did during COVID, it was followed by the greatest inflation we've seen in our lifetimes)
* This technology might literally destroy the world in the next 10 years, and we keep accidentally releasing it into the world like its Skynet. But we are not responsible for it, and by the way its unavoidable with this technology. Somewhere on the other side, utopia will arise (No really your standard of living will actually go up after losing your job this time unlike everyone else, trust me.)
Then half the people in this thread is smugly are acting baffled at why people don't want this, and going "Hey they don't know that much about data center logistics but still oppose this. What is up with that?." Forget about if a data center actually ends up being a net drag if its near you and the standard nimby stuff. Even if it weren't, what benefit does marching towards this future have for anybody not in the top 10%? Sure, you can make a bunch of economic theory arguments: growth is always good, stagflation, Luddites, etc. But in practice, economic advancement and technology over the past 30 years has advanced so fast people can't even comprehend it, and in return everybody is becoming stupider, more unhappy, polarized, and the median standard of living has dropped as rich people have 20x their net worth. Why would a normal person want more of this?
Exactly. The most baffling thing about the backlash is how shocked the tech boosters are at it. I know tech can be a bubble, but it's stark to see just how out of touch people inside can be.
Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better. They are deeply skeptical that future gains will be freely shared with them rather than horded by a few tech oligarchs. Based on pretty much all of modern history, they're right to be skeptical.
This is apparently incomprehensible to many AI proponents, but many people would genuinely rather live next to a farm than a data center. They don't care that you can vibe code a hobby project or a jira ticket 10x faster than before. They do want cheaper utilities and a secure economic position, and they are well aware that AI is providing the opposite for them.
> Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better.
Most people's lives in tech have been made worse, not better, by AI. We have threads on the regular where people complain that they hate their jobs now that it turned into babysitting an LLM writing code. And those are the people most predisposed to be excited about new tech. It should be completely unsurprising to anyone paying attention if people outside tech hate AI.
> The most baffling thing about the backlash is how shocked the tech boosters are at it.
Instead of data centers, perhaps we need to start throwing up mental institutions for these people.
>This is apparently incomprehensible to many AI proponents
like who? I think most people recognise the problems?
The current framing of US politics is basically "vote for us because the other party is an existential threat" and data center proponents have adopted a similarly retarded position "we have to build data centers or China wins."
For this framing to work, you need a base of reliable supporters already all-in on your cause regardless of how you actually perform, and the data center proponents have done virtually everything imaginable the last four years to drive people away. Why AI investors are shocked (shocked) is really beyond explicable reason; American on both teams have never responded well to this kind of brain-dead gambit.
Any hope of a bailout for AI or data centers vaporized last night. If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.
Good. That's how America's free market is supposed to work.
Thats the only good thing to come out of this. The rest of it really highlights how we acrewed up violating personal liberty with overly agressive zoning and other regulation.
We decided back during the 1930s that it explicitly isn't how the market should work, because having the entire economy crash (which is what the AI bubble bursting would mean at this point) is a bad thing for most people. This is why America - and indeed any country except perhaps Somalia - doesn't have a free market, but a regulated market.
Why do you say that? TARP was extremely unpopular yet still happened.
Very different situation. Banks failing en-mass is very different than some VCs, private credit speculators, and AI bros losing their shirts.
yes, happened under both a red and blue administration. It was the perfect example to show that political party is meaningless when it comes to financial bailouts.
People cared about TARP because these were companies managing their retirements and banks holding their savings. They had been around for 100 years+ and many had branches in their hometown.
Very few people know, or care, about AI companies in any way.
If AI companies go bust so will those retirements accounts (and the economy) So I think it is likely that AI companies will be bailed out when the bubble bursts.
I guess the lesson multinationals learned from the 2008 financial crisis is that if you fail is better to fail really really really big.
Tech stocks, and stocks in general, are overwhelmingly held by wealthy people who are way more exposed to crash than working class folks. The median retiree is much more reliant on social security and safe investments than they are on NASDAQ. Even if a few big tech companies go to zero it will only have a modest impact on their finances.
Obviously there would be knock on effects of a major crash that are hard to predict, but people inside the AI bubble wildly overrate how invested most Americans are in their success.
Never underestimate the willingness of politicians to vote for pork.
Not at all. The reasonable democrats will be forced to clean this mess (and Iran) while spending their newly found political capital and pissing off their base.
AI bubble pops - they will vote bailouts if the situation is 2008 like. They will grudgingly support or even escalate the war in Iran because just leaving is not an option - so some stability is a must. They will support israel for the same reason.
And they will support data centers buildouts because ai is the future of economic growth.
Trump has created a mess in which there are few good moves. But they will own them.
thats called free market capitalism...
> If an AI company gets in trouble it will be a “let it burn” scenario.
That's how things should work. Bailouts are socialism for corporations.
Democrats have participated in previous bailouts, I don't see why they wouldn't participate in this one. Especially given that the "it" in your "let it burn" scenario isn't AI companies, it's the economy.
The Republican party has changed so much since 2008 it's almost unrecognizable. Don't assume that the current Democratic party is the same as it was then.
Maybe we'll be able to buy computers again sometime before the end of the decade.
The scale of the market fuckery is incredible. We are trying to install an MR scanner. Chillers are becoming hard to get and on long back order. The supplier says that the units we want are not really the right units for data centres but due to shortages of the units data centres really want, they are picking up alternatives.
It just shows the utter hollowing out of the US industrial base to me.
Everything has been cut to the bone so any blip in demand cannot - at any price - be effectively responded to. Even if you were exceptionally good at being able to double internal capacity, the supply chain all the way from raw materials to skilled labor pool your vendors may need just isn’t there.
This latest datacenter bubble is just the last and most acute symptom of this problem I’ve noted in my lifetime. Hyper-financialization does that to an economy.
The best anyone can do is outbid peter to rob paul.
Consider that semiconductors are the worst case situation for a supply chain planner:
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
This sub-thread wasn't about semiconductors though. It was for chilling plant. Semiconductors I do agree are a somewhat special case - but also one the US ceded it's capability in and largely offshored.
But it's way more than just chillers. It's everything from structural steel, to electrical transformers, copper cabling, optical transceivers, electric generation, skilled workforce in the trades, etc.
Overall this boom has been relatively tiny as far as US industrial booms historically have been, and we cannot ramp up production even if there was the political will to do so.
It's not just datacenters. Look at the military industrial supply chain these days. We can't even scale up WWII era artillery shell production in any reasonable timeframe. Much less modern weapons systems.
This is completely unsurprising. Data centers are the epitome of the phrase "Privatize profits, socialize costs."
It's amazing to me that no matter how seemingly "smart" tech oligarchs are, they don't realize that you actually have to incentivize people to do the things you want by making it benefit THEM. You can't just go "Oh, this is good for society so you need to take one for the team!" Nobody believes that BS anymore. When have the oligarchs themselves ever "taken one for the team?"
Now they will just need to build datacenters in more remote areas, and pay for the infrastructure themselves. Personally I've always been a fan of building them on old oil rigs or stuff like that because there's no point in wasting fresh water to cool these things when seawater is almost as good.
But my main takeaway remains that it's just wild how BAD tech oligarchs are at understanding the psychology and motivations of the public. You'd think that when a group of voters can absolutely destroy you and everything you worked for just by passing the right legislation, you'd put in some effort to understand their mindset and incentives. But these people seem to spend all their time in their own echo chambers. Maybe in a twist of irony, their social media algorithms tell them only want they want to hear so they have no idea how much the general public hates them.
Drake No: datacenters
Drake Yes: Green compute sanctuaries
Bet me this isn’t just going to be a PR issue.
And it will all be explained away and get roundly ignored.
Hopefully!
Maybe now the tech oligarchs and their lackeys will realize that anti-AI and anti-data center sentiment isn't just some Chinese influence campaign.
Not just any Chinese influence campaign.
It's a very successful Chinese influence campaign.
Ahh.. yes, dismiss those against actual job losses and nuisance buildings as useful idiots, very new concept, very credible.
It's not that hard to build these in a way that isn't mendacious, the total moral collapse of the hyperscalers is not something to celebrate.
"Anybody with an opinion I don't like is a Chinese psyop." Do you hear yourself?
It is a very pro China and not US policy though. Datacenters are going to be built not the question is where is your data and compute going to live.
its going to bring a fraction of the jobs they are projecting. and just most jobs will be temp/ contract just to build the damn thing. after its built it 90%+ related to the project will be out of job and likely leave your town (best case)
They’re probably inevitable anyway. Nobody likes to live near any kind of industry. For me as a kid that was dairy farms. Fucking horrible. Nobody lining up to close them down though. Hog farms are also terrible. Chickens I can imagine too, never seen one personally though.
Even something relatively innocuous like an orange grove. Rented a house in one before. Peaceful most of the time, free citrus. But when it got too cold they’d burn diesel in these little tower things and run a wind machine (like a giant reverse windmill) that was loud as fuck all night.
Had some relatives that lived near some kind of paper pulping plant. Guess if that sucked or not?
Now that I think about it, the local environment not smelling like absolute shit is probably a relatively recent development.
Pretty much. Mushroom farms smell like shit when the wind turns. Even just normal farms smell like manure at various times of the year. Amazon fulfillment centres are hideous and create a lot of traffic in the surrounding area. There's a reason building industry near residential in the SimCity series causes residential property values to drop.
Sugarcane processing makes the area smell like baby shit.
lol this is so true i couldn't really pinpoint the smell
Marijuana farms in California smell like… you guessed it, marijuana!
I lived near mega diaries and oil fields growing up. Depending on the wind you either smelled manure or sulfur. People used to say "smells like money" because ag and oil were the source of jobs in the area.
I also believe they’re inevitable. Capital will find places without opposition and build them. There are thousands of jurisdictions in the US and capital usually wins.
I’ll take data centers over pig farms pulp mills any day of the week.
We have so much vacant industrial land in the rust belt (so-called "brownfields"), with good access and utility infrastructure, why not build the data centers there? Why do they need to go on farmland in the countryside?
Because it’s faster, cheaper, and easier not to. If you (gov) incentivizes it, then problem solved.
Places like Gary, IN should be courting them. Great access, on a huge lake so water is no issue, not in a hurricane or earthquake zone, and they desperately need people/companies paying property taxes.
Brownfield is the most expensive construction because you have to mitigate all the damage from the last owner.
We had a cake/chocolate factory near my town growing up, on some windy days it smelled really nice.
This is simply a fear of being left behind.
Yeah, no shit. People don't like the job stealing machine.
The sad reality is neither sides' politicians care. Conservatives opened the doors for the elitists, now the liberals come in and close the door behind them, ensuring no other competitors get in. This "Dems vs Reps" opposition portrayed in the media is really just a clandestine partnership. And the general public falls for it every time.
Of course, the US is fully of NIMBYs on all fronts. Housing, progress, infrastructure.
In my local area, there's routinely local opposition to substations built due to growing residential demand and water infrastructure facility build.
They're old boomers who don't want anything built, especially not if it will economically benefit their children.
Unless you're really ideology driven there's very few things that can be built around your neighbourhood (especially in a suburb) that will make it more valuable or pleasant to live. NIMBY is just not wanting to lose things.
This. If you own real estate, you have to account for that risk.
But current prices typically assume powerful NIMBYs blocking new development.
Data centres have no real reason to be built in anyone's backyard. To prove it I'll just say that some of the guys that want to put it in your backyard, also ponder putting it in space.
Interesting, so why is there still massive opposition to data center build that is several miles away from any residential housing?
They're very loud and run 24/7.
In many cases "several miles away" means several hundred miles, there's not going to be anyone around to hear them.
If you follow that reasoning you can put them in Yellowstone.
The datacenters in space thing is probably fraud, judging by the number of times investors are hyping it as "free cooling because space is cold"
Forgive my ignorance, but how would the current data center proposals "economically benefit their children"? It seems like a local land concession that would benefit a national economy, but hardly do anything long-term for the locality where the data center is built (maybe ~100 jobs and some property taxes).
Not sure where you've been but US productivity has skyrocketed since adoption of AI and this productivity increase has not been replicated in jurisdictions slower to adopt AI. This pushes up wages, decreases costs etc.
That's aside from the build-out jobs.
Anyone who works anywhere close to data center build including construction, networking, sysadmin is cleaning up right now. Their wages have doubled and demand is huge.
Maybe it is 100 permanent jobs, but that's huge for a small community, and the thousands of temporary jobs make an impact, too.
Can you point me to some data showing skyrocketing productivity? I haven't heard that one before.
It's all over BLS data, but here's some coverage: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-05/us-labor-...
In most localities, the taxes levied on a DC would easily cover the school budget and then some.
Tax breaks are usually at the state level, towns get paid out, which is why so many towns were rubber stamping approvals so quickly.
The high-level solution, though, is to stop concentrating housing and all the supporting infrastructure. NIMBY is a positive force in that regard.
The classic economic force concentrating people and businesses into small geographical areas is jobs, and perhaps jobs can finally be much more remote than in the past.
BTW, people will accept data centers near them when the price is right. The data center people just need to find that price.
Jobs, services, cultural institutions, hospitals, restaurants...
I'm curious how you can square spreading infrastructure/housing around with the impact of climate change. It seems like the answer through that lens is to drive sustainable urban planning, not to move further towards suburban sprawl & car-centric culture.
No, if we disincentivized rural living like we should, and incentivize living in the city, this wouldn’t be a problem.
are data centers profitable, or are there currently a ton of hopes and dreams filled by outrageous investments that will bring down the economy if/when the bubble bursts? i am worried that it's the latter, but i have no clue and it feels too stupid to be true. are they actually making a profit?
Yes, this is the trillion dollar question
You're all "missing the forest for the trees" here, in that the end goal of these "AI data centers" is to put us all out of work and replace us with machines so that the already filthy rich can (somehow) get even richer. Apparently we'll all continue to buy their products and services somehow even after we're all fired because a machine can now do our job. None of it makes any sense when it comes down to it, but nobody's got the guts to come right out and say "The Emperor's not wearing any clothes!"
Good
You know who has a lot of power / space / water?
Private compounds owned by billionaires who believe data centers are the best. Seems to me, they already have a solution to their problem.
They roundly rejected tech bro billionaires.
They did not. They rejected the billionaire tax in California. A bunch of temporarily embarrassed billionaires in California protected the rich
Apparently the problem with a country having an annual budget over 7T is more taxes. I'm sure that will fix everything .
The US has not had a "budget" since the 1990s.
The narrative consistently in all the advertisement was that there was some sort of “loophole, which would allow politicians to lower the income threshold at any point without needing a vote”. I probably heard that statement over a thousand times in the past couple months.
That and even Gavin himself got on the pulpit to preach how it was poorly drafted and shouldn’t be passed. I legitimately don’t think I saw a single person or advertisement for it, you’re the first.
Shockingly, some of us have principles other than "government should seize the assets of people I don't like".
This fuels the bro billionaires.
So much money lost by Musk and co! Love it! The people always have more power than a few rich people.
i'm not cheering or crying because of the results but curious about what happens next, I guess ready or not, into the future we go! Do me a favor and right down the 10 things promised to you by the people you voted for and put it an envelope to open 2 years from now at the next election. I think that's a worthwhile exercise and asked my kids (17 and 14) to do the same since they were both super tuned in to the election and have their own opinions.
And you don’t feel dirty about this victory because your glee is based on TikToks making people believe that data centres turn water dirty?
They don't care about water moron, they just hate Musk and his kind and they hate AI. Rightly so. People are taking back the power. Fuck you and fuck your stock price
Data centers are the way of the future. We can either embrace them or fall behind places like China. I definitely think they should pay their own way 100%, but for God's sake, look at the big picture. Everyone uses AI in some way or another every day.
The only time I use AI is when I accidently click on some slop search result or YouTube video. Then quickly click away once I realize what it is.
We can only hope this trend will continue from defense to offense, actively punishing AI companies and their leaders for the harm they have inflicted and continue to inflict on society.
Florida still elected pro data center governor so it ignores that in very short article.
And you seem to be unaware that Florida was the one single outlier in an otherwise massive rejection of of the status quo.
Just from browsing headlines yesterday Alabama and Tennessee also elected pro data center governors so it’s not universal.
Florida is immaterial and effectively irrelevant to the DC buildout
I say this out of genuine curiosity: does Florida even make sense for data centers with the increasing weather patterns there? Feels like every time I read news about Florida, if it’s not political, it’s some natural disaster.
I assume there must be companies doing things like this there but would the big co’s actually want anything there?
I just used Florida for one counter example but Tennessee and Alabama just rolled out the red carpet, as results have come in, too. The usual course of things like this is the corporations will play different jurisdictions off each other to get more and more off taxpayers dime like pro sports stadiums and Amazon heralded HQ2 - thankfully voters in a lot of states mentioned rejected unlimited data centers - but it is not universal. The fight continues.
US voters will do absolutely anything but stop using the apps and technology from Big Tech that are powered by these data centers. It's always hilarious when someone shows me a Reel or TikTok about how they hate data centers. Often, they will also send off an AI response on why data centers are problematic. They are completely oblivious or knowingly ignorant.
So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it.
I think they're saying that "data centers" have become a totem, where people believe that rejecting datacenter development projects will solve problems that cannot be solved this way. I've encountered more than one person who thinks, for example, that if we just ban datacenters there will be no powerful AI systems so we won't need to study their capabilities and risks in detail.
You don't need to have the correct reason for making the correct decision. What rejecting data centers will do is slow down the obscene excessive demand for more memory being taken off the consumer market, even if just a little bit. It will force AI models to become more efficient within their resource constraints instead of sucking up all the air in the room.
Sure. But it's risky to let people make correct decisions for incorrect reasons, because they may react in very silly ways when their goals aren't achieved. If the populist tide turns onto memory companies ("stop making AI chips!"), and a widely supported protest encampment blocks Micron's new fabs, that's going to increase your memory woes more than datacenter moratoriums helped them.
Reserving judgment until you've actually researched a topic is the third option.
"Yet you participate in society, curious! I'm very intelligent."
I think in this case that’s not exactly right. TikTok isn’t exactly foundational to our society, you can get by without it.
Smart phone or other things this sentence is usually trotted out for not so much.
Tiktok isn't. But how many people can get by without using any service that depends on datacenters?
Many people. I bet I could. You only need cash.
pretty sure the traffic lights you use on the road rely on data centers. sames goes for the buses and trains you may or may not use. The weather report too.
Pretty sure in Europe I can just walk or bike to places. I can use my local AI to get the weather report by just looking at the sky.
A ridiculous gotcha on a site where every other article is about using AI to automate your job, solve frontier math problems, or port old video games to new platforms. So to be clear nothing is our fault here? It's all just about the billionaires "making us" use AI for all these things?
Companies do mandate AI usage from the top, no?
Who mandated people reversing and porting old games for fun in their home?
If my government just decided to wire $1B account into my personal account without strings attached I'd 100% accept that in ecstasy. So if I say "spending money this way is unfair" I'm a hypocrite???
Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical?
One of the nice things about living in a rich country is the ability to externalise certain costs.
Just not latency.
at least you're honest about it
I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit?
The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!
The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that.
I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about democracy lately. The average voter will ask for a grab bag of contradictory things and then complain about attempts to deliver any one of them. My local subreddit wants cheap housing but also wants to preserve farmland and maintain historic buildings and welcome more immigrants at the same time.
My gripe is less with democracy and more with the ad-driven economy that has taken over.
The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.
There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.
Yup, can't have your cake and eat it too.
Political choices have trade-offs. We have to give up some things to gain others.
But somehow politicians get away with promising to solve all problems all at once, even though that's clearly impossible.
Obviously the solution is to make the cell towers less ugly :p
this but unironically
Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and petulance.
Common pattern:
"I'm campaigning against A."
"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."
"I don't care!"
The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.
We live in a system wherein our survival is gate kept by oligopolistic technology, energy, and health insurance corporations.
One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.
Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.