[ianm218]

I live in NYC and think the politics in the city and state have been a disaster for middle class people and see this as a continuation of that.

The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.

NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.

All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.

[overfeed]

> I see this as a continuation of that

You may have to explain how middle class would have benefited from the data centers. It's not clear to me at all how the moratorium is "a disaster" for the middle class.

[ianm218]

There is huge amounts of construction costs on these things and electrical work as well. The general rule is 50% or more of construction in NYC goes toward labor, so that drives up wages for local talent.

Obviously any given project is temporary but it seems like there will be a multi year build out so lots of projects.

There is then the secondary effect of skilled labor like machining and manufacturing parts for these centers locally when it makes sense, I.e. turbines or rack assembly.

Data centers pay high property taxes which has been huge in places like Virginia.

And then it’s not just data centers there is kinda a larger war on construction in the North East in general. So NYC blocks tons of common sense urban infill, the state blocks common sense infrastructure projects, and it’s death by a thousand cuts and people just leave the area or leave the trades because it’s not worth it.

Genuinely huge projects like Microns $100B fab in NY get delayed and moved to the center of the country [1], which would’ve been huge for the local economy in terms of spending and opportunities.

[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/micron-delay-construct...

[preg_match]

The job and economy effects drop off a cliff once the DC is actually built. They take remarkably little staff to run, and they certainly don't do much for the local economy. We can tell BECAUSE people are erecting them in the middle of nowhere. There is no local economy, and that works for DC specifically.

I can't erect, say, an Amazon SWE office in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. How will I get:

- Talent for my office? - Food, shelter, and creature conveniences for my workers? - Culture for my workers? - Entertainment and nightlife for my workers? - and on and on

Turns out DCs need like... none of that. Which is why we just put them anywhere, it seems, and we don't build them in downtown Seattle or Manhattan. But we do certainly put offices in Seattle and Manhattan.

Also, while the DC itself takes some local capital to build, both labor and materials, everything inside the DC is imported. We don't use skilled workers to build GPUs for the DC right, we just buy nvidia.

[inigyou]

And then afterwards the electricity gets shut off to everyone who isn't a data center? That's what Georgia is threatening right now.

[newguy1000]

Do you ACTUALLY think that's a possibility? It's silly

[inigyou]

Of course I think it's a possibility that power companies follow through on their 1-year plans. Why wouldn't I?

[Izkata]

It looks worse than that, in Georgia people are apparently being forced to sell their homes to handle the power requirements for datacenters: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-power-ai-data-centers-e...

[cogman10]

Yes? Why wouldn't it be?

These things consume a pretty huge amount of power, more than a steel mill. If they are haphazardly put on a grid without the generation support then the power company has 2 options, brown out or selective blackouts (or risk tripping the whole grid).

It's not silly that an already stressed grid (I'll remind you that NYC just recently asked its citizens to turn the AC to 78 to avoid a brown out) might be pushed over the edge with a new datacenter.