[defmetrix]

I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.

[dylan604]

Once construction of a data center has completed, how many jobs will they actually be adding? It reminds me of the people saying that oil pipelines are good for jobs, but that's again only a temporary blip during construction. For data centers, for the sheer size of them, they are massively empty of people.

[kotaKat]

One data center in upstate NY tried to include a call center as part of it in their quote of "500 jobs" for a planned Bitcoin farm, but then mentioned that the call center would be doing 'healthcare advocacy' calls.

My stomach twisted because that can generally just mean one thing in my experience in the call center / tech support industry: outbound Medicaid/Medicare ripoff scam service calls.

Their DC never came to fruition, but a few others up here did. "Hundreds of jobs" didn't happen, they got maybe like 30 parts swappers and security dorks to run around an old Superfund site and play hardware babysitter.

[WarmWash]

Those things are cash cows for local municipalities. I don't think that aspect is communicated at all, or at least the media leaves that part out.

A town a with a $50M budget can easily have a single large datacenter cover the townsfolk's entire tax bill, and then some. The worst part is the fan noise, but I am sure they can figure that out.

[dylan604]

What? These things are built specifically where the towns give them tax breaks

[WarmWash]

Generally datacenters are built in less dense areas that already have low taxes. So the cost to "buyout" the town council (i.e. "We will cover 75% of your municipal budget") is a rounding error for the datacenter builders.

Its states and federal usually offering tax breaks. But at least on the lowest level, it's pretty cheap to buyout a rural town, and that's why you get these town councils voting 9-0 to approve the projects before anyone even hears about it.

[CodingJeebus]

"Job growth" is such an easily manipulated metric by companies to score tax breaks from governments, especially for companies like Amazon that can claim "our warehouse will create X jobs" while developing autonomous warehouse technology that significantly cuts the number of actual jobs on the back end.

Such tax breaks should be tied to auditable figures verifying that the corporation hired the number of people they claimed they would, but of course they would never agree to such terms.

[ecshafer]

How many temporary and permanent jobs does an empty lot provide? Many temporary and a few permanent sounds much better.

[zerobees]

New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.

[skybrian]

It looks like farming is declining in New York?

> Over the past 10 years the number of farms and amount of land actively being farmed in the United States has steadily decreased. Between 2015 and 2025 the number of farms decreased by almost 10 percent and the land being farmed dropped by more than 4 percent. The changes in New York in this period have been more dramatic, with 15 percent fewer New York farms and 11 percent less land in farm production than in 2015.

https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/new-york-farms-and-farmland-d...

National trend:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58268

[ecshafer]

Are you sure New York doesn't have many empty lots? I can go drive through Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo and find plenty. There's a ton of land that is not being farmed that are is fully of rocky, poor quality soil.

The data centers weren't going to go into NYC, but upstate New York has plenty of space for Data Centers. Oswego has two power plants, and could use two more. Building is good.

[thinkingtoilet]

So other people's back yards it is! What a wonderful philosophy.

As for Amazon HQ, I don't know what NY's deal was but I was in Boston when it was a consideration and the amount of tax breaks they wanted was insane and would have been a huge net loss for the city. I'm very glad it wasn't moved there. It doesn't matter if you create a few thousand jobs if you get literal billions in tax breaks, it's a net loss for the state.

[alpha_squared]

If I remember correctly, reporting at the time just after DC was selected was suggesting that it was always going to be DC to be in close proximity to government and that the whole fiasco was a way to extract as many concessions as possible from the city in its efforts to "compete" for the new offices. What even is an "HQ" if the actual headquarters that disproportionately houses more office workers than anywhere else is still in Seattle?

[jcranmer]

Hell, after the 'competition' was announced, many commentators observed that it was pretty much written with Arlington, VA in mind, and the competition was less a serious competition and more a ploy to try to get a lot of subsidies for what their plans already were. It's also worth noting that the bids that were accepted (Arlington and New York) were some of the most miserly bids.

[bloppe]

The biggest possible tax break is zero tax, which is what you get when they move out of state

[thinkingtoilet]

Again, it would have been a net loss for the city. So walking away with zero is a huge win.

[bloppe]

How do you figure? Curious as to where the costs come from

[sincerely]

Well there are plenty of places that aren’t in anyone’s backyard

[beart]

"Backyard" is obviously not to be taken literally. Anywhere you put one of these things is going to have an impact on the region. But perhaps you can provide some examples of places that are not in anyone's backyard?

[kube-system]

"in [someone's] backyard" is a colloquialism that refers to "those who are in that area"

[rightbyte]

Amazon wanted a deal that was just bad for NY.