[IFC_LLC]

It's fun to watch how a thing that can potentially create an immense surge of economic development is being vilified. Yes, true, you can't just take and build a data center without having the power and water and all the rest of the things. So fine, make investors to come and build new power plants and get more water lines. This is going to handle a lot of current problems in the infrastructure.

We could have used the momentum to build new work opportunities and resources.

Instead we managed to mis-represent the thing so much that people won't even consider having a data center in their vicinity.

It COULD have been a good thing. It became a bad thing.

[moron4hire]

The modern "data center project" looks more and more like building a stadium for a professional sports team.

Oh sure, you can make the argument about how it's going to drive sales tax revenue and create jobs and all that.

But then the reality sets in. The massive property and corporate income tax breaks and subsidies and land use variances that were all negotiated as part of the deal come to roost. The jobs aren't upwardly mobile jobs. The income tax revenue isn't enough to offset all the other breaks.

And you end up with a yolk saddled on the backs of the working class. Of which the bachelor degreed workforce necessary to make something like a data center happen gets treated more and more like a trade than a profession.

Back in the 90s when NAFTA was on everyone's tongues, something like a data center would have been a huge boon to the local economy. And let us be clear, "local economy" means families. But today, things like this study, show that people have no confidence the Invisible Hand is working for them anymore.

[gruez]

>But then the reality sets in. The massive property and corporate income tax breaks and subsidies and land use variances that were all negotiated as part of the deal come to roost. The jobs aren't upwardly mobile jobs. The income tax revenue isn't enough to offset all the other breaks.

Then it sounds like the issue is subsidized datacenters, and the solution is simple: don't subsidize them.

[Tanoc]

Almost nothing this scale can be built without subsidies because in the U.S. no company is willing to actually buy anything on their own. Wal-Mart forces local municipalities to pay for the buildings to be built through subsidies and taxation delays. Amazon does the same with their warehouses, distribution centers, and Whole Foods. NFL and NBA stadiums as well. Either the locals pay for the "privilege" of having their money vacuumed out of the area or these places don't get built. And as many city and county level politicians are very poorly versed in terms of macroeconomics they fail to understand that the addition of those two hundred jobs will cost the area two to three times as much as the employees will make because they can't collect taxes from an entity that is increasing wear on the roads, increasing load on the electrical and water infrastructure, and creating new external costs in the form of garbage disposal or light and noise pollution.

These datacenters are like that, but taken even further because they're attached to an industry used to ridiculous tax breaks or lack of taxation in the first place, constant investor capital, and continuous rapid growth. Software production and digital infrastructure have grown up in a wildly different environment from traditional retail and shipping logistics, but they're taking the most successful (and harmful) expansion tactics from retail and shipping.

Unless you can kill subsidies outright for anything connected to a national or international entity and provide enough specifics to prevent them from hiding behind shell companies then it's a losing battle to say "don't subsidize them." They'll either force you to pay for them or they'll move somewhere that will, and those with a poor understanding of the situation will complain for years that everyone lost out on a "big opportunity" by refusing to pay for their own predation. That complaining can echo into local politics for years afterwards and affect the outcome of various policies, either by denials out of spite or misplaced regret over the previous big project, or by politicians being voted out because of their opposition to a Wal-Mart or such being built via extensive subsidies and an agreement to collect no taxes for ten years.

[moron4hire]

Amazon HQ2 is an excellent example. Even though I live in the DMV, I found it ridiculous that Amazon selected Crystal City in which to build. Not even actual DC! What sense did it make to not select NYC, outside of a sweetheart tax break package that Amazon famously made cities compete over like some kind of perverse reality TV show?

Maybe the solution is a federal ban on local tax breaks for anything not classified as a small business. Of course, such a thing would be impossible. But we really need to end this asymmetric warfare between sophisticated, global scale corporations and the comparatively podunk municipalities those corporations easily fleece on these deals.

Maybe a major city like NYC has enough sophistication built into their local politicians due to just their shear scale to be able to handle this sort of negotiation. That's a really big "Maybe". But other major cities like DC (even though AHQ2 didn't even land in DC, DC has it's own fair share of being duped) have proven they don't have that and time and time again they get taken for a ride. We need to level the playing field for local politicians, many of which are basically just the high-end middle class/low-end upper class middle-management type career people who don't have anywhere near the background support and army of lawyers that a major corporation brings to the battlefield. They're in it for either the backend deals they can make with local real estate developers or some quaint notion of "doing their part," either way they aren't part of a global scale Hydra beast with more money than God to be able to handle these cases.

[gruez]

>Almost nothing this scale can be built without subsidies because in the U.S. no company is willing to actually buy anything on their own [...]

All this feels like a heuristic (ie. large projects are bad because subsidies) taken too far. If the actual thing that's bad are the subsidies, then all your objections and talking points should be around that, rather than side claims about electricity costs or greedy tech giants. Otherwise you might actually be losing out on the good datacenters are a net benefit for the county's finances, as others have mentioned in this thread. It's like swearing off credit cards because "interest rates are sky high" and "they need to charge high interest rates because it's an unsecured loan". All of that's true, but it's also true that if you avoid the interest rates, credit cards are quite good thanks to cashback and purchase protections. By taking a generic "credit cards are bad" stance you lose out on the benefits of credit cards.

[moron4hire]

You're arguing against "the trade-offs make the deal untenable" with good examples of how by just stating "but the trade-offs make the deal tenable." You're not actually adding anything to the argument.

[moron4hire]

Easier said than done. They don't let me in on those meetings.

[ndiddy]

Since they're such a positive, I'm sure you would be fine having one built near you: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dvOuZmmJm7A

[protocolture]

I work at multiple and I cant hear them outside of the data halls.

"Theres one noisy data centre" ok deal with it locally and stop using it for your silly crusade.

[Game_Ender]

That data center is running on local power generation because they failed to get power run to the data center properly and essentially exploited a loop whole in planning permission that allowed them to install local power generation: https://www.loudounnow.com/news/sterling-residents-raise-ala...

It’s the only 1 out of 200 in that area, so it’s not representative of what data centers sound like. It does show how you can’t trust the operators to do what best for the local community. It does show how a functioning government works because Loudon county increased oversight and changes the rules to stop another project like that. Setup policies to manage externalities, and don’t make ignorant bans.

[mindslight]

It seems like they should be changing the rules to outlaw that ongoing activity rather than considering it grandfathered. If a kid buys a loud car stereo and then the city passes a noise ordinance, it's not like the kid gets to keep on blasting his stereo because he already bought it.

[freetime2]

It certainly sounds terrible. I just don't know how credible this YouTube short is. They could be turning the gain way up, using a completely different sound recording, etc.

A sibling post links to a news story [1] which I think is more credible and they measured the noise at 90db right outside the data center - which is certainly high. But they are filming next to a highway and a shopping center, which were presumably quite noisy to begin with. And both of the residents they interviewed hadn't even noticed the noise before the interviewer pointed it out.

They also show some footage from a different data center in the area, and it is much quieter. So sounds like it can vary from datacenter to datacenter, with this one being unnusually loud.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkvabeNMaxU

[ungreased0675]

There are new data centers near me. My employment prospects haven’t changed. My utilities, particularly electricity have gotten more expensive though. Property taxes have gone up a little bit.

I’m not against data centers, I don’t mind one way or another. But they’ve definitely not improved the neighborhood and have almost no positive benefits for the community that I’m aware of.

[protocolture]

I really feel like DC operators should have a strike, shutdown 50% of their data halls for an hour, and they will suddenly be the most beloved industry on the planet.

Half the stuff going on in most data centres the terminally online crowd would consider to be human rights these days. But you cant calculate that element from Twitter.

"Whats the value of a router terminating multiple VXC's to me, jim everyman" well jimmy, what if you are about to place a call across that VXC.

[vasco]

You're all on the internet in your community and using software services so that's like saying you have no benefit from having a power station when you all use electricity. They have to be somewhere

[ungreased0675]

Sure, if we’re talking about “the internet” in general.

I’m talking about the data center near me, which powers a large social media service. I do not see any benefit to my neighborhood, and I suspect my power bill and property tax increases are subsidizing the data center, instead of the other way around.

[mbgerring]

You are absolutely smart enough to know the difference between a data center for internet-distributed software and a data center full of GPUs solely for AI, along with the attendant increase in power and cooling needs. Don’t play dumb, please.

[vasco]

I'm not playing dumb but you I'm not sure. Just think for 2 seconds why datacenters exist. It's not billionnaires scrolling tiktok and making all those AI pictures for Facebook. People want the thing the datacenters exist for. The same way they want disposable clothes made by slaves in far away countries. They just want the datacenters to be far away as well, not to stop them. It's the convenient hypocrisy of complaining about consumerism while swiping your credit card mindlessly, it's always someone else's problem.

[mbgerring]

I see you moving the goalposts! And that’s fine, because this is also wrong: the pace of AI datacenter construction far exceeds actual demand for AI datacenters or actual AI products. The current pace of construction is purely speculative.

[vasco]

Its if anything incrementally speculative, not purely, unless you think there's actually zero demand. And those datacenters are built to make money selling services, they aren't a vanity yacht.

[good8675309]

> So fine, make investors to come and build new power plants and get more water lines.

If you believe they are going to build their own power plants and water lines, I've got a bridge to sell you

[watwut]

> t's fun to watch how a thing that can potentially create an immense surge of economic development is being vilified.

Maybe the titans promoting AI should NOT promote it on the "we will make you all unemployable" and "we will flood zone woth slop, what you like will die and you womt have a choice".

Without the years of sociopathic tech CEOs, maybe people would be more open to the idea of "it wont end up as pure power grab, with ai used to extract more money from me while making me earn less".