[lbarrow]

For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.

If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.

[slabity]

> modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.

The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees.

The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.

[unicornporn]

Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers. Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI) datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.

[j2kun]

My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.

[harimau777]

Perhaps unfortunately, vibes are part of being human. Ignore them at your peril.

[bluefirebrand]

Vibes can be safely ignored when they are disproven by easily accessible facts

[joquarky]

Facts are ultimately just vibes that pass a cultural filter.

[DrewADesign]

Bingo. Data centers are a net negative wherever they are. Giant, employ far fewer people than a grocery store after they’re built, crank up electricity costs, use tons of water, air pollution if it’s self-powered, noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,) ugly… the only local entities that win are the landowner and the municipality that collects taxes on them. Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers not realizing that they employ so few people. From what I hear, even much of the construction is done by flown-in contractors with experience doing it elsewhere.

The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches.

Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here.

Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.

[marcosdumay]

> Data centers are a net negative wherever they are.

They really shouldn't be.

There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging. There's no reason they can't be placed under some environmental regulations that cancel all their negatives, at least on some places. And they would still pay taxes.

But no, datacenter owners are using their connections to remove any regulation instead.

[scoofy]

Obviously the solution is to tax them instead of ban them so they end up dispersing income to the surrounding areas. The entire point though is that they won't get built where they are taxed, and eventually, through regulatory capture or governance capture, they'll get built without having to compensate for their exteralities.

The cynicism of residents is reasonable. They've have to be highly educated to actually understand the implications of what they're doing and how that revenue can be distributed. America's decline lends itself toward small-town corruption, where patronage is more important than communitarianism, due to large and accelerating net worth inequality, and an economy where outcomes are based on inheritance over labor.

This explains the logic behind an outright ban. You don't have to be vigilant about corruption and the principle-agent problem if the thing is just banned.

[order-matters]

>The entire point though is that they won't get built where they are taxed

I dont think this is entirely true. Maybe not the first wave of data centers, but there are a lot of factors that go into the cost calc and its possible that it would still be worth it to build them even if taxed.

[BeetleB]

He's not saying it's economically unfeasible to build where taxed. He's saying they'll simply build elsewhere where they won't be taxed.

About a decade ago, a bunch of data center companies got fantastic deals with my city (low/no tax). People are pretty upset about it. A few years in there was a report on how many people they employeed. I think combined it was under 10 who lived in the area.

[AgentK20]

Unfortunately it’s a race to the bottom in most of America: If you pass such regulations locally or in your state, the data centers will simply choose to not build in your area of authority (county/state). Unless we were to pass sweeping, nation-wide regulations (which this administration is aggressively against because they believe we are in an AI arms race with China), those regulations/bans just drive the data centers elsewhere.

[bryanlarsen]

Maine obviously wouldn't have a problem with that, this law indicates they want them somewhere other than Maine. Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large segment of the population that see outright bans as oppressive but support environmental regulations.

[cucumber3732842]

>Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large segment of the population that see outright bans as oppressive but support environmental regulations.

So basically steal legitimacy from real environmentalists by applying their label to something that's not really motivated by environmentalism but can be construed that way?

"They don't actually want what I'm selling so I'm gonna dress it up as something else, they'll never know"

AreWeTheBaddies.jpg

The other problem you're gonna have is that this isn't an original thought. You're at least 20yr late to the party. So, so, so much absolute garbage has sailed under the flag of environmentalism that the public is starting to be more critical (see for example the kerfuffle over wind turbines off Rhode Island) and it's not unforeseeable that eventually the environmentalists are gonna have some sort of purge or reformation or reversion to more traditional environmentalism and serving corporate interests in order to reclaim some lost respect/legitimacy. Trying to sail "obviously not primarily about the environment" stuff under the flag of environmentalism is only gonna hasten that.

[DrewADesign]

But people probably wouldn’t have a problem with them building a data center in central Aroostook. Nobody making these regulations wants to simply stop data centers from being built anywhere— they’re trying to stop people from building them where it will really suck to have them, like densely populated Lewiston. I actually left tech to work in manufacturing. I know the value it provides and how much it can negatively impact others. Big companies want to build this shit near population centers because it’s more convenient, profitable, easier to hire people, etc. Tough cookies, I say.

[overfeed]

> There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging.

One solution: local taxes on the economic value generated by the data center. MNCs love to play accounting games, so a simple formula based on metered GWh multiplied by reported worldwide revenue with a scaling factor a fraction of a percentage. This fund should be ring-fenced be address whatever externalities are introduced by the data center, including electric bill subsidies, infra maintenance, and funding independent oversight.

[hackable_sand]

What's the need?

[bitexploder]

Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution? It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?

[bombcar]

Almost anything can be mitigated at some cost - but it has to be determined what those mitigations are, and then demand them.

Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).

[bitexploder]

True. There likely needs to be some sort of templating handled by states. Each data center and location will be different and require assessment. This does drive costs up for the data center, but I don't see another fair way to handle it really.

[fc417fc802]

They get their own unique third category as unlike industrial sites there's no hazardous chemicals and even the noise pollution is substantially different in nature.

The old datacenters are analogous to office buildings that emit some unusual noise and consume large amounts of electricity.

The new ones (ie gigawatt class) consume enough electricity for ~1 million households and at minimum enough water for 100k households (but possibly many times that).

[bombcar]

Where does the water go afterwards? Is it evaporated? Sewer?

[ikr678]

Large industrial customers often have to sign up to load-shedding agreements wiith grid operators in times of peak grid load.

Can datacenters load shed when requested? If not, they should be paying a premium/spot market prices for power if they arent participating in load management.

[bombcar]

The one I toured (decades ago) and dual redundant multi-megawatt diesel generators (big boys, always ask for a tour when they’ll be testing them, it’s fun to hear them start).

Local utility would ask them to shunt to the generators now and then during potential rolling blackout situations.

[DrewADesign]

The city making money off of it doesn’t make the impact smaller. You can’t tax away the air pollution coming from a gas turbine running in a populated area.

[bitexploder]

That was my point. It doesn't all have to be taxes. It can also be agreed upon mitigation maintenance. Better filtration on gas turbines, etc. Green spaces to mitigate sound impact. I don't know, I am just wondering if there is a model that can be designed that makes a data center "balance" within its local environment instead of getting the opposite, tax incentives. Right now I agree, they get to socialize the costs and reap the benefits of building data centers to a large extent.

[DrewADesign]

That all sounds nice in theory, but does the Lewiston municipal government have the resources and expertise to determine what countermeasures would be effective? Would it be left up to the company paying for the mitigations to decide what’s reasonable? I think we know how that would turn out. Even in heavily regulated states, industrial pollution still heavily impacts people in the vicinity. They usually accept it because so many of them work there. This place was estimated to employ 30 people. We don’t even know if problems like infrasound are reasonably avoidable or mitigated, and it’s not like they can make more water. Additionally, the way the industry has conducted itself over the past decade has been abhorrent. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t try to circumvent every last shred of mitigation knowing the city has comparatively minuscule resources to fight it.

If we put them anywhere — and I’m not convinced we really need all of the data centers we have, let alone all the ones we’re building — they should not be in the middle of densely populated areas like Lewiston.

[order-matters]

youre starting a good conversation but as per typical internet fashion you are being critiqued as though your direction of thought is being presented as some sort of final solution.

i completely agree that we should be looking into modelling this in terms of what is possible to mitigate its impact and what does that look like with current technology and costs, and where would we need to develop new tech, and what would be the critical values to hit to consider mitigation a success

[rangestransform]

The fact that they need to use gas turbines at all is a tragic condemnation of how the US can’t build shit at all. We should be consuming more (green) energy to make our lives better, and rushing toward diminishing returns on energy consumption. Instead, we have this unholy alliance of (usually right wing) NIMBYs and (usually left wing) degrowthers that make it much more convenient to use a gas turbine than build renewable energy somewhere windy/sunny and plumb it in with some transmission lines. Renewable energy is way past the tipping point of being cheaper, the gas turbines are just there due to regulatory burden at all levels.

[DrewADesign]

Yeah, but unfortunately, here we are, and there are the companies that want to build these things in completely inappropriate areas because it’s more convenient.

[hermanzegerman]

They lobbied for tax exemptions for 10 years or longer in most cases. Which probably is the useful lifespan, from most of the stuff in there

[Anechoic]

noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,)

Noise from data centers is a real issue, but Benn's measurements and analysis are not great (speeding up the sample rate to demonstrate frequency effects is just wrong, among other issues).

[jesse_ash]

It was a bit misleading in terms of the audibility of infrasonic noise, but I think he did a good job of highlighting some of the effects of infrasonic noise on QoL/health with the study towards the end. IIRC, he also recorded some regular human-range noise that I would personally find disruptive to have to live with (though this was a fair bit closer to the data center than the claimed range of infrasonic noise's effects)

[will4274]

- Datacenters don't use tons of water compared to just about any other business.

- It's not really fair to blame datacenters for using the municipality's electricity and then blame them again for being loud and generating electricity instead of using the municipality's electricity. Any given datacenter is only doing one of these.

- Presumably, the municipality's tax dollars benefit the people who live in the municipality in the form of better services

[sershe]

Doesn't this also apply to new housing? Strain on services per job created is probably even higher. The benefits are for someone currently not living here, just like data centers used for remote users. And if cheaper housing is available obnoxious poor people might move in. I think there should be a moratorium. Not in my backyard!

[DrewADesign]

I’m not sure who you’d expect to sway equating data centers to east coast urban housing during a giant, sustained housing crisis, but your obviously disingenuous argument is completely ridiculous.

[sershe]

At least my comment is not completely content free. How is it different?

First, the gp comment says the data center is not good for existing residents - obviously true for housing too, which you didn't refute.

Then it assumes statewide ban should be based on personal preference of local residents. That is just a definition of nimbyism. While in reality I am a YIMBY and the end was part sarcasm, I would genuinely prefer living next to a data center, rather than next to non immigrant poor in the US. I grew up lower middle class or poor by US standards, and also live in Seattle, lots of experience. So I say along with data centers we have a statewide ban on anyone who is lifetime net consumer of tax money anywhere near my backyard.

[andrepd]

> Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers

My national government is currently giving massive tax breaks for one of these. It's going to be, after all, "the biggest foreign investment in the country ever"...

[DrewADesign]

This thread is obviously being brigaded. Wiped out like 30 upvotes on one comment in no time. If you need to silence people talking about your company or favorite toy, maybe you should re-examine your life choices. Pathetic. Is there some polymarket nonsense going on here?

[beastman82]

I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs

[DrewADesign]

So maybe someone can open a new sandwich shop and accomplish the same thing without screwing everybody else in the process. Not only that, Lewiston probably doesn’t have a glut of data center talent seeking employment —I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that not a single person living in Lewiston when a project like that was approved would be employed there.

[will4274]

The data center jobs are middle class. With progressive taxation, those 30 middle class jobs generate about 100 average people's worth of revenue. Presumably Lewiston has schools which could use the funds.

And presumably everybody in Lewiston already has lunch somewhere, so a new sandwich shop that was successful would put another lunch spot out of business, for a net zero jobs.

Edit: the larger point here is that jobs, particularly skilled jobs, don't grow on trees (much like money). New technologies and new jobs replace old technologies and old jobs. If you put a ban on new technologies and new jobs, you'll just have more unemployed people.

[DrewADesign]

Nobody that lives in Lewiston will get those jobs, and the people that get those jobs will almost certainly live in more upscale places nearby.

Tack a new building that size onto Bath Ironworks? That’s a huge boon. Heck even an Amazon warehouse would be an improvement. But a data center? For the people in Lewiston, it would be far more of a negative than a positive — and that’s the way it works in this country. We value money over people. If private equity, venture capitalists or huge corporations want something that you don’t want, you lose. Getting a policy win is a rarity and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get successfully challenged in court.

[will4274]

You forgot to include an argument in your comment. I cited specific positive impacts (tax revenue) but you just talked about negative impact in the abstract, without citing anything specific, and then went on a rant about how the world works.

[dawnerd]

A sandwich shop would also be infinitely more useful to the population.

[gmm1990]

Not if it drives up energy prices and makes other businesses that employ more people less competitive. Not saying that is the case but it’s certainly not a given

[unicornporn]

Are you saying that those thirty job will go to people currently living in Lewiston?

If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the minus side?

[tejtm]

that would translate to three townees for janitors the rest would be durn furiners from away *

* further down east than Lewiston but, there was a time I was the damm foreigner from the big city.

[mrguyorama]

The three weed stores that opened up in the past week employs more people than that and produces more tax revenue.

[john_strinlai]

imagine how many other 30-job employers could fit on the same land that the datacenter would take up.

a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.

(the # of jobs angle is not the right approach if you are a proponent of new datacenters. there are much stronger arguments to be made)

[andsoitis]

> a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.

Fast food chains are damaging to human health.

[john_strinlai]

neat!

replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument against them.

[physhster]

Less than 30 makes no sense. It's easily in the hundred if you account for shifts and the specialized jobs required.

[jcrawfordor]

The number the developer gave in a press release was "20-30." I find that reasonable as a very large Facebook data center near me has a permanent staff of around 50. Keep in mind that these large DCs use contractors for the majority of the work, which unfortunately doesn't really help with employment because the contractors mostly come in from out of state (there is a HUGE temp labor market for traveling IT technicians and skilled crafts get hired mostly from big national outfits that just send whatever crew is available next). It is good for the hotel business though.

[physhster]

You have no idea how much maintenance is required. Just replacing hard drives, not even counting server repairs, new servers installation, network infrastructure installation and maintenance, power distribution, generator engineering, water treatment etc etc

[jcrawfordor]

And that's all stuff that they bring in out of state contractors for. I know, it sounds odd, but this is pretty normal for any large industrial site.

[bombcar]

Once it's built, it basically runs itself.

You have a guard, some remote hands, maintenance, maybe additional security or two, times 4 for the various shifts. 30 sounds about right.

Even 20 years ago the datacenters I worked with often had fewer employees onsite than "visitors" - because they rented out racks.

[physhster]

You're confusing colos and first-party data centers. A colo mostly relies on its customers for installs and maintenance. Google, MS, FB, Apple etc own the entire building so all the functions are local: server install and maintenance, network install and maintenance, generator maintenance, electricians, water treatment in some cases... That's very easily in the hundreds if not thousands for big sites.

Count the cars here: 36.242186561973, -95.32619746715035

[pixl97]

Yep, and anything outside of that is contracted groups that come in from outside. Maybe a hotel in the area would get a little more business, but it won't be much.

[DrewADesign]

From the Maine Monitor:

[…]the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.

[pj_mukh]

"We are for the jobs the comet provides" - Don't Look up.

I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing itself out of power[1],[2].

I understand people are threatened by this technology, the tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that. But to hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial factories are a serious environmental threat but if they provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire.

[1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...

[slabity]

Don't Look Up is about ignoring expert consensus on a clear threat, not about rejecting benefits out of fear. For the analogy to land, you'd need overwhelming evidence that these data centers are net-positive for host communities, but that's exactly what's in dispute.

You're right that there's tension between 'not enough power' and 'no new heavy loads' but it's not hypocritical to argue that megawatts of power should be allocated towards 7k jobs rather than a few dozen if possible. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff a power-constrained state should be explicitly making. The logic behind it is not satirical, it's just triage.

On top of that, this is not a blanket ban of AI datacenters. It's a temporary blocking of any new datacenters that require more than 20 megawatts until late 2027 pending a PUC study on how these datacenters will affect their existing grid. It also creates a new council for researching and coordinating the creation of new datacenters, so this really doesn't seem like any sort of NIMBY action here.

Honestly the only major issue I have with the bill is that it neglects to distinguish self-powered facilities that don't provide much strain on the grid. Though it could be argued that water consumption of these centers might be the reason for it.

[rolandog]

> Though it could be argued that water consumption of these centers might be the reason for it.

Indeed! And we also shouldn't forget the CO2 and NOx emissions from gas-powered turbines (on some)... Also IIRC 9+°C warming in the surrounding areas, loud droning noise, and I seem to recall that there might have also been local water well pollution.

[fr4nkr]

The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power.

Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.

[efromvt]

I wonder why this doesn’t get us frustrated with the grid, not data centers. Delays on interconnects for renewables and offshore wind both seem pretty self inflicted.

[TheTaytay]

I keep wondering this too. It feels like such a self fulfilling prophecy: don’t build new power plants. Don’t build nuclear. Get mad when the grid can’t keep up…it’s defeatist and anti-growth-of-any-sort through a different lens.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

To be fair, for decades, electricity consumption has been mostly flat. There has not been a need to massively ramp up new generation or distribution. It is only in the last few years that such mega consumers have come online that is requiring new development at a frantic pace.

[fc417fc802]

Not true. Electric vehicles have been threatening to collapse residential grids for quite a few years now. The US hasn't been making the necessary infrastructure investments for a long time. See PG&E for example.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

For something the size of the electrical grid, you can find regional variations, but the national trend is quite clear. One report from a quick search[0]

  Consumption Growth Acceleration: After 14 years of near-stagnant growth (0.1% annually from 2008-2021), US electricity consumption surged 3.0% in 2024, driven by data centers, electric vehicles, and economic recovery, signaling a new era of demand growth.

[0] https://solartechonline.com/blog/how-much-electricity-does-u...

[trueno]

I mean one has to also consider the current political _and_ geopolitical landscape now when it comes to energy needs. And given the current outlook and environments even states are now operating in with federal overreach shutting down offshore wind farm efforts and more, it's not hard to do the calculus that lands you squarely in this reality:

- most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the moment

- literally no one could tell you if scaling up with clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it.

so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_ economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right way so it doesn't result in even more financial uncertainty for people that are already financially uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the increased energy demand.

[YetAnotherNick]

Also power is not at all a limited resource as many top voted post on HN thinks it to be. Increased demand decreases the price of power not increases it in the long term.

And in any case ban doesn't make any sense. Instead they could charge different for grid electricity usage, and make the datacenter pay for grid expansion when they start building it.

[anon291]

Because we have decided that electrical generation tech ended once China became better at it.

Instead of dealing with that like adults we are throwing a fit instead

[ch4s3]

> AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing

This is not even remotely true[1]. Large auto plants use on the order of 200–250 megawatts of power, which is either on par with a data center or slightly more than a data center depending on the size and how cooling is handled.

[1] https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/tools/Industr...

[tadfisher]

New AI data center builds are being specified in gigawatts, my friend.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yup. Here's slides from last year's HotChips on where AI racks are going: https://hc2025.hotchips.org/assets/program/tutorials/HC2025....

The racks rolling out now are in the 100s of KW each, targeting 1 MW per rack as the rough limit for using 400v DC.

The next iteration is go up to 800v DC, riding the coattails of power management components from the EV industry.

[jmyeet]

I suspect uou've misread that document. It is a good document though. It's saying a large parts plant uses ~188,000 MWh, I think per year.

A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity. Those two things aren't the same. 20MW of continuous electricity use (which AI data centers do) translates to 175,000 MWh of electricity per year. That's about the same as a minimum and might be 5+ times more.

This document is only about energy usage so we have to guess what "large" means in terms of employment but 3000 to 7000 seems to the range. Compared to 20-30.

But AI data centers are worse because they actually produce what I call negative jobs. Their currently only value proposition is in laying off people and otherwise suppressing labor costs. All while the residents all pay more for their electricity with the money no longer have because they got laid off.

[fc417fc802]

> A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity.

I understand the high end builds to have exceeded 100 kW per rack at this point, with the largest sites exceeding 1 GW (ie 10x your upper bound). So the smallest datacenters use as much as the largest auto plants, and the largest datacenters use 100x that.

[bnewbold]

Where are you getting the 200 megawatt number from?

The document you linked says that a large auto assembly plant consumes around 188,000 MWh annually (with regional variation). By my quick math that is less than 22 megawatts baseline load (24/7/365).

There is a mention that natural gas and other fuels being used on-site, are you converting those to MWh equivalent? I'm not as familiar with that conversion, but from a quick online calculator I found it would still be under 75 megawatt for electrical and fuel-equivalent combined.

[bigfatkitten]

And a data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit whatsoever to its local community, unlike something like an auto plant that creates entirely new supporting industries to support it and its employees.

[cheriot]

Property taxes come to mind.

[xphos]

Local municipalities collect this and often get tricked into not collecting it via agreements to host it in or near their town for multiple year agreements. Also the assessed value of the property may not come anywhere near the costs of increased electricity demand, water usage and noise pollution problems. For locals

Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.

[toast0]

Property tax is often assessed on capital equipment owned by a business as well as real estate. So while the real estate may be of limited value, the hosted machines could drive significant tax revenue as AI machines are spendy.

You're right though, that municipalities often waive taxes to woo big projects.

[xphos]

Yeah but i think server farms are tricky to access because they have accountants to argue about depreciating CPUs, second hand CPU deppreication is enormous so its possible to wiggle the numbers down. Not to zero but the challenge is that you have to recoup not just hthe land value but the value related all the infrastructure and resource drain this type of business does which is very non-trivial

[bigfatkitten]

Outside of colo facilities in metro areas, minimising property tax is always a key consideration in choosing a location.

[andsoitis]

> data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit whatsoever to its local community

Following that logic, are you suggesting that data centers should not be built at all?

[bigfatkitten]

I’m saying that communities are absolutely within their right to oppose developments that make their homes and their lives worse for no benefit.

[mediaman]

Loudoun County in Virginia generates $1 billion in property tax revenues from data centers.

It funds half of all of their expenditures.

Can you imagine having half of your total municipal government budget being paid for by data centers?

Their citizens pay much lower property tax rates, and get much better schooling and police.

Henrico County (also VA) took $60 million in unexpected new revenues from data centers and created an affordable housing trust that is subsidizing low-cost housing.

Although these counties are figuring it out, it's an incredible failure in imagination for many of these liberals in other states to look at an immense source of new funding that could support schools, housing and health and just spurn it because they heard from a friend of a friend that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.

[no_wizard]

They’re an anomaly that benefits from a number of factors like being close to the government for contracting, early data centers built there and they tended to congregate and dumb luck.

They’re an outlier and don’t really prove much of anything.

Oregon has lots and lots of data centers and not much to show for it on any front, other than higher electric prices for consumers

[mediaman]

Oregon gave a lot of time-limited property tax breaks. They also don't have a sales tax.

So I would agree that giving away the #1 way that data centers contribute to the government isn't optimal, though you could argue it's a long-term play.

As the tax break terms expire, Oregon will get $450 million in annual property taxes from the data centers, or about 1.4% of the state budget.

[bombcar]

Hopefully they don't end up with a "Digital Detroit" when datacenters start closing.

Though even if the AI market collapses, the capital spent means they'd probably keep operating; paying for 30 employees is much different than paying for 3,000 at a factory. But the datacenter might be owned by the creditors at that time.

[fc417fc802]

> that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.

How exactly do you think they dissipate the heat of a continuous 100 MW or 1 GW power draw? I have no idea what book you're referring to but you can do the math yourself it's quite straightforward.

[valleyer]

The book is "Empire of AI". This blog post explains it pretty well: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans, erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200 cc of water per day.

[trollbridge]

Perhaps part of the problem here is that most towns that have proposals for AI data centres (including my own) have the developers demanding 10 year tax abatements, so we aren't going to see any of that tax revenue.

[orenlindsey]

I would argue that with the rise of coding and debugging agents, the AI data centers provide (or will in the near future) even more benefit than a car factory, in terms of digital infrastructure. These technologies are just a lot more invisible so we don't realize how important they are.

[pesus]

Can you explain how important they are? So far the benefits seem to be limited to faster code generation, which doesn't solve any actual problem people were facing, and is greatly outweighed by the negatives.

[pojzon]

Yet we read everyday that Agents generating astronomous amounts of slop and pointless projects are also straining global digital infrastructure.

Which is also “invisible”. Using this technology to make advancements in healthcare is 1% of its usage. While 99% is garbage apps noone needs, memes, deep fake videos and porn.

AI as a whole for now is a net negative for the world.

[mcmcmc]

Don’t forget the portion that’s used for mass surveillance, scams, and other blackhat shenanigans. Or supercharged personalized advertising with dynamic pricing. And you can’t miss propaganda and dark money influence campaigns.

[rurp]

LLMs are and will be used as malware, propaganda, and slop generation agents more than they will be used as debugging agents. The amount of energy that we'll need to consume going forward just to defend against malicious users and to filter down the flood of slop is absolutely eye watering and will continue to grow as far as we can tell.

[culi]

It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles

[km3r]

Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.

Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.

[idle_zealot]

They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.

[cmiles74]

You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target.

I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target

[antisthenes]

Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts.

Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.

[vkou]

If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.

[Bratmon]

Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.

The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.

[carefulfungi]

Of course Mainers aren't monolithic...

https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla....

https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...

[Bratmon]

Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses.

And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.

[cucumber3732842]

This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank.

Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies.

I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.

[throwaway27448]

> Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.

I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.

[Bratmon]

Data centers don't really help the material conditions of Mainers though. Here's the net effects of new data centers they'll really see, in material terms:

- A brief boost in construction jobs

- ~0 new jobs in the long term

- Increased electricity prices

- A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff

It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from this decision. There's actually a good chance a data center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer materially, because the change in electricity demand (and thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.

[throwaway27448]

> Data centers don't really help the material conditions of Mainers though.

No, but solar and wind farms certainly do.

[Bratmon]

Not if 100% of their power is being used to power data centers

[culi]

The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027

And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it.

https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...

[ainch]

Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.

[irishcoffee]

Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?

[ainch]

Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?

[irishcoffee]

I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?

[butvacuum]

Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid.

What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.

[throwaway27448]

> Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.

That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.

[josefritzishere]

I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.

[swarnie]

Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.

But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.

[bloppe]

It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect.

These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.

[MattSteelblade]

A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.

[butvacuum]

Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it.

The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.

[butvacuum]

Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.

[fc417fc802]

That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar.

Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.

[km3r]

What? The water is not getting boiled off. Datacenters, for the most part, have closed liquid loop cooling systems. Electricity goes in, hot air and bits come out.

[fc417fc802]

The old datacenters had. I don't think anyone is air cooling (radiator or otherwise) a gigawatt. Convert 1.3 million liters per hour from boiled water to air and you get an absurd number.

[butvacuum]

did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith.

Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.

[fc417fc802]

The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context.

The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions.

Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.

[donmcronald]

> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.

What's the math on that?

It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.

[butvacuum]

For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?

[hermanzegerman]

It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers

[bornfreddy]

Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.

[einpoklum]

Why? Because:

1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used.

2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.

[km3r]

It's in addition to our normal efforts to switch to renewable. No one said this replaces those existing programs.

That investment should be happening, but it's not going to comes from companies that you ban from operating.

[harimau777]

Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?

[bryan_w]

Can we trust them to not build the data center anyways? If you think companies always get their way, then a ban is useless, as they will just do it anyways.

If on the other hand, believe in the rule of law, then creating a good airtight law that sets the stipulations that would be needed before building a data center is what lawmakers should be doing

[bluGill]

That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.

[mmmm2]

And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?

[bluGill]

There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years

[xphos]

Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources.

Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?

Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much

[tjohns]

> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?

You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.

> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.

[fc417fc802]

> an excise tax on number of servers

We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.

More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.

[xphos]

I mean yeah it think their are some ideas around how to tax things better and rolling up the real infrastructure and resource costs. All these things can be done but the conversation above has that as the last thought which is what many towns that get destroyed by data-centers do. They job to conclusions about these things being universially good or making jobs but dont' engage with the reality of the math that goes into that decisions. Whether towns can do that hard to say but I believe the state government has an obligation to aid its local governments and stake holders i.e people to not get ripped off and forced in to terrible contracts that hurt the states long term

[xphos]

Yeah but the data centers write contracts that making changing the laws around property contractually impossible if you don't argree to their hostile terms they just move to the next town willing to accept. Towns are not a necessiarly smart enough to do all contractual footwork especially when companies heavily lobby the towns population with empty promises. But even if they do the best thing that happens is the company moves to a more willing town. Most data centers are build in poor places because those towns are looking for something to change their circumstances.

Also I am not saying factories are all good they pump stuff like TEFLON in rivers but at least the people locally get a good job out of it. And they make those trades even when the negative impacts exceed the positive gains like with data centers. Its from position of depressed town where the people want to see the golden days return.

Also this is a deal with negatives and positives you haven't listed a positive for these data centers in your reply I think is indicitive that you haven't explored the effect of data centers in places like Louisiana which is very permisive.

I think just saying maybe towns should do better laws doesn't recognize the power differential between a town and likely a poor town and a Trillion dollar corportations. Idea's like an excise tax like that is way more complex than you are thinking does a server excise tax effect just these data centers or anyone doing data center processing i.e local hospitals. The Law is very complex when it comes to inventing new taxes but yeah some of those things should be investigated it might be a good case to have a pause to study those proposals and implement them so that towns don't just get screwed over. And I am not saying there isn't a dynamic in which data centers can help local communities its just that has not been the case for more data centers than the public is potentially willing to tolerate. Make the economics better for people and I am sure governments would not stand in the way its just at this point their is little effort to do so.

[threetonesun]

I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing.

The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?

[BrenBarn]

I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook).

On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?

[pesus]

> On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?

I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sentiment in the coming years in one form or another.

[themafia]

> For people who support this kind of ban

I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that.

> would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Has anyone actually done that?

Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?

[seattle_spring]

If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support banning them too.

[shaky-carrousel]

Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot machines.

[inglor_cz]

Slot machines are (ab)used by relatively few people.

OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy.

Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.

I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.

[pixl97]

>who already use or (say by 2030)

Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then.

>do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.

Which does put some distance between you and whatever disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was more important than safety.

You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.

[dclowd9901]

For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?

[cloudfudge]

In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.

[xphos]

The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.

I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves

[cloudfudge]

> The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is obviously no requirement to have them.

[fc417fc802]

Being against a ban is equivalent to requiring that something be allowed. It might or might not end up happening, but either way it is permitted.

[cloudfudge]

"Requiring something be allowed" != "requiring them to have them"

[dclowd9901]

If you can't ban them, what else would you call it?

[strongpigeon]

Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.

[kube-system]

Usually that's a good approach but it doesn't work as well for industries that are in boom-bust cycles or have externalities which persist longer than the lifetime of the company that caused it -- because you either end up in a situation where you have to tax it all up-front, or end up in a situation where companies disappear and leave you to clean up their mess.

This is notoriously problematic with oil and gas wells. When it's profitable, they're maintained and you get tax revenue. When they're not profitable, the company might just disappear and you're left with an abandoned uncapped well spewing pollution, generating zero tax revenue.

[rangerelf]

This right here is the right take.

[trollbridge]

Might have the effect of making it uneconomic, though, and then they wouldn't get built.

[chao-]

I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban". There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a wide spectrum of attributes:

- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).

- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).

- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.

These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.

[inglor_cz]

In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice. By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but outright bans should be very well justified.

Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.

[petre]

It's a free state. Like the Swiss banned minarets in Geneva the Mainers should be allowed to vote to ban datacenters. AI bros can always opt to build their stuff elsewhere, like Texas or Abu Dhabi.

[inglor_cz]

I was talking about a free society. You changed that into a free state.

State X may be free in the sense that there is no military occupation or outright dictatorship, but that does not mean that its society values freedom highly. There are degrees to "lived freedom", and being too ban-happy is on the (for me) bad side of the spectrum.

Imagine a very religious society, something like a Puritan state, or a Wahhabist colony, where the faith itself imposes significant restrictions on everyday life of an individual and all laws are derived from religion. Would you call it a free society? What about the few non-believers who live among them, what level of freedom do they enjoy (except the freedom to move away, if they have the means to do so)?

This is not a simple boolean variable.

[tt24]

That’s not what a free society is.

That’s like saying “Mainers should be allowed to ban speech they don’t like, and private sex acts they find offensive”. Your view of what constitutes freedom is nonsensical.

[petre]

Your examples are both unconstitutional (see Lawrence v. Texas for the second), so no, there are limits. Also the majority of sane individuals would not bother to vote on that kind of stuff to meet a qualified majority, not in a democracy and not without a massive brainwashing campaign (which should be banned btw). Also, as others have pointed out, this is not a ban but a moratorium. AI bros just have to wait until the hype cools down to build data centers in Maine, or build them elsewhere.

[jmyeet]

So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are:

- 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside;

- Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people.

Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year.

So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people.

Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize.

My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs.

Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".

[MisterTea]

> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Those factories employ people.

> Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills

No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.

[rvz]

AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did.

Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements.

Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-cente...

[Forgeties79]

I’m not particularly excited about construction on either of those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on “factory construction,” however one would define it. And either way it’s kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking about data centers not factories and 2) what I’m seeing happen with the data centers being built has made me pretty against them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...

[cucumber3732842]

>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.

[zdrummond]

I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories > AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more control over AI firms.

[carefree-bob]

People are worried about their power and water costs rising.

I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom.

I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario.

But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.

[cma]

When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that state.

They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong.

A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.

[neophobia]

As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2) electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much owned by qatar.

[dakolli]

Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.

[LogicFailsMe]

Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.

[pesus]

Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't financially motivated by their stake in an AI company should support new data center development for AI? Especially someone who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively affected by the construction and operation?

[kube-system]

I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to any industry.

A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.

[romaniv]

>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.

[dreambuffer]

It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.

[throwaway27448]

It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower latencies for corporations.

[ZeWaka]

One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and noise pollution.

[hammock]

Historically the factories in Maine were mills, which use water for power. Those days are long gone but in a different time you would find no resistance to more factories in Maine, it’s a wasteland now

[stego-tech]

This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.

The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.

As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.

So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.

[freedomben]

> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.

The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.

[nutjob2]

It's a reasonable choice given that DCs use massive amounts of power and provide very few permanent jobs.

I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?

[8note]

there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes factories safe or not.

whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations?

data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations

[sQL_inject]

It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their educational institutions.

The rest will fallow.

[QuadmasterXLII]

They expect the coming crop of data centers will be used to hurt them, and don’t want them built anywhere?

[AvAn12]

If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.

In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.

Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?

[raincole]

> new competition for water

Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.

[TheTaytay]

This whole conversation is happening due to data centers existing…

[burnished]

Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in general every now and again.

[Nevermark]

> For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Car parts factory?

With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio comparable to an AI data center?

I did not know those existed.

But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes".

A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs, reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic: Bitcoin means green energy!

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813

(For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)

[insane_dreamer]

factories aren't as automated as data centers (at least not yet) and still contribute more to the local economy than data centers

[myhf]

Car parts are tangible. Even if the product doesn't stay onshore forever, it has to enrich people onshore in order to move.

All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.

[embedding-shape]

> If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.

Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions.

To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?

[nkrisc]

It depends what the factory is producing.

[gensym]

No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to kill my livelihood and everyone else's.

The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love.

The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.

(To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)

[yfw]

If theyre a grift that takes from the community and taxpayers like that foxconn "factory" at mt pleasant.

Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them

[SamDc73]

yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories, that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the problem.

[kube-system]

It isn't necessary to evenly distribute industry across the entire country out of pettiness.

Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters, they simply trade them.

[SamDc73]

I don't know if I get you're points because lobster farms are tied to certain external factors in a way things like data centers aren’t.

but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it’s not ‘no housing,’ it’s ‘just not here.’

so when someone say ‘let someone else host them,’ it really comes across as: I want the internet, just let other communities pay the environmental cost.

[kube-system]

The cost of running a datacenter and the impact it has is also tied to external factors. The environmental cost is not the same in all locations. There are differences in land use, environmental requirements, power generation methods, and the downstream impact of all of those.

[bparsons]

Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good.

Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.

[harimau777]

Several reasons:

AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist class over labor more than new factories.

AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied itself with the fascists.

Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves upon communities that don't want them.

If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is useful.