[fintechjock]

How are they harming consumers?

I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.

Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t

[autoexec]

> How are they harming consumers?

Consumers like breathing (https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-pollution) and drinking clean water (https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/data-center-accused-m...). The noise is loud enough to cause hearing damage, and the smell and light pollution isn't helping consumers either.

[fintechjock]

Those are residents, not consumers across the US

[autoexec]

Consumers across the US are the residents. They're the same people. Especially when it comes to those living around data centers. The CEOs of amazon, google, and microsoft aren't living next to data centers and being subjected to the worst of the harms those data centers cause. The people who live near data centers are the consumers of those companies (while also being the products those companies sell). The consumers buying RAM and GPUs are the same people suffering from the pollution data centers cause and paying the price for the environmental harms. We are the consumers. You, me, and our families.

[kube-system]

Residents of homes are typically consumers of utilities, and consumer utility rates are going up in areas of high energy demand.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/confronting-and-addressin...

[j_w]

> consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes.

What data centers are bringing cheaper software, unlimited cloud storage (for free?), or lower local property taxes?

[fintechjock]

Cheaper software – all of them

Nearly unlimited cloud storage - AWS / Google / etc. Data centers are the Cloud

Lower property taxes - data centers increase the property tax base, creating tax compression, which shift property tax from consumer –> company. I'm in Texas, so can only be sure that is true here. I have not looked at all other states.

[j_w]

Cheaper software: where is this cheaper software? Most users don't pay for most software. Facebook/Instagram are introducing paid plans now. LLM companies are seemingly starting to increase prices.

Unlimited cloud storage: Where are consumers getting unlimited cloud storage from? I'm not aware of AWS/Google/others reducing prices/providing unlimited plans.

[fintechjock]

> Cheaper software

Software prices are down 73% since 2000: https://x.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/2015463505298878746

> Nearly unlimited cloud storage

$9 / month for 2tb of cloud storage is a pretty sweet deal for anyone. And unfathomable if you travelled back in time before data centers were scaled.

Data centers are a net good for all consumers. Pretty significantly!

[j_w]

Oh stop. Both of those are a bit ridiculous. We are talking about the sudden surge of data centers, the past 1-3 years, not the 20 prior to that.

Sourcing a tweet that doesn't have a real source (saying source: BLS without an actual reference to BLS isn't a source) is worthless.

Consumers don't buy software, they buy services. Whether or not that is captured by your source in the "Computer Software" is unknown, since I don't have the source. FRED via BLS has PPI for software publishers going up in the last ~6 years, but that's not exactly analogous to consumer spend.

When you say 2tb for $9 is unfathomable if you travel back in time, yes obviously if you go back to floppy days it's comical. Cloud storage prices have been the same for a decade now (pre LLM boom).

So software may or may not be cheaper for consumers (hard to say, nobody buys software). And in real dollars cloud storage is cheaper because of inflation. Not sure what the significant gain is.

[fintechjock]

We can be respectful with this!

The tweet is from Mark Henry who updates that chart often. It’s cited pretty often. There is a bit about the methodology here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

My original list was just some brief examples, all of which I think hold up, but not nearly the entire list of data center benefits to all consumers. (One of those other benefits being the means to have this very conversation). There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.

[babypuncher]

Have you not seen the tech price hikes happening? Steam Decks went up 40% overnight

[wat10000]

The massive spike in the price of RAM is making consumer electronics more expensive and worse.

[fintechjock]

True, for the average HN consumer

But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about

[macNchz]

To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.

The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...

[intrikate]

It seems to me that anyone going out of their way to compare current prices against prices from five or more years ago to adjust for inflation is not the average consumer, and shouldn't be juxtaposed as such.

[wat10000]

High margin products are often the last to be impacted at retail because the seller has some cushion. And the impacts are only just getting started. We see the MacBook Neo with a somewhat sad 8GB RAM, most likely due to this. We'll see a combination of just plain higher prices (Steam Deck and Switch 2 have both gone up) and shrinkflation in the form of lower specs.

[kube-system]

The Macbook Neo is 8GB because the A18 Pro has 8GB memory baked into its sandwich-style package at TSMC. The way these SoCs are constructed doesn't lend itself to having it paired with an arbitrary choice in memory specification the way other laptops do.

And Apple has longer-term contracts for delivery of their chips. Apple is more insulated from short term supply shocks because of this, and their giant pile of cash. But even they have discontinued some high-RAM configurations because of the situation.

As you mention, products elsewhere that use RAM have already gone up in price.

[fintechjock]

Interesting, thanks!

[kube-system]

The data centers being built due to the AI bubble are predominately increasing costs for public utilities. Many localities are having to make significant investments to keep the lights on and increasing rates for everyone.

If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.

[fintechjock]

I don't see a widespread issue in keeping the lights on, outside of the Lake Tahoe fubar.

Considering utility rates, I would happily pay more for utilities in the short term to have 30+ years of lower property taxes. The data centers property taxes would go to paying for that buildout, and over time it's a great deal for consumers. That said, I'm in Texas so the property tax issue is more prevalent than it would be in New York.

[kube-system]

Lake Tahoe might be the only area literally with issues keeping the lights on, but many more are facing rate hikes and debt spending to build out infrastructure and keep up with increases in demand for utilities.

The prevailing idea is that we're currently in a bubble, especially when it comes to AI hyperscalers, and that the tax revenue will decline when the bubble pops.

Also, not all localities have updated their public utility regs to appropriately assign the costs of infrastructure projects to these new projects. Many, like NoVA have just recently added new utility rate classes specifically for data centers to attempt to do that. In other places, these costs are often are being split among the existing utility customers.